


there's a bear in the woods

by itsnotbleak



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Canon-Typical Violence, Identity Issues, M/M, Memory Loss, Mild Gore, Not Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, sad Steve
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-25
Updated: 2020-03-17
Packaged: 2020-05-19 12:27:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 39,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19357009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/itsnotbleak/pseuds/itsnotbleak
Summary: James is not Bucky Barnes. He’s not the Winter Soldier either. He’s a blank slate. A whole new person. He knows he can shoot pretty straight and he doesn’t like green jello; he knows he thinks Harry Potter is stupid and he thinks he might be able to speak Mandarin. Beyond that he’s a mystery. He doesn’t know himself, and he sure as fuck doesn’t know Steve Rogers.Here’s the thing: James hasn’t been entirely truthful.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so I've been working on this for ages but honestly all I have is 35k of random snippets. I've decided to post this first chapter in the hope that momentum will see me through to an actual plot, but I wouldn't want you start reading this thinking that further instalments will be immediately forthcoming. It might take me a little while.

When the Winter Soldier fronts up for his first Avengers mission briefing, he’s met with the sight of Captain goddamn America sitting next to the only free seat in the room.

“Bucky!” says the Captain, when he spots the Soldier. He looks like he’s about to wet himself with excitement.

“James,” corrects the Soldier, and sits down. He’s not entirely sure James is any better than Bucky, but apparently people have to have names.

Rogers’ face falls, and the Soldier — _James_ , might as well get used to it — feels like he’s kicked a puppy. Jesus Christ. “I thought you were still...” Rogers trails off.

“In a padded cell?” James says. “Nah, they let me out last week. Looks like they’ve finally decided I’m more useful than I am dangerous.”

Rogers doesn’t seem to know what to do with that. “I’m glad you’re here,” he says, after a moment of hesitation.

James doesn’t know what to do with _that_. “Okay,” he says, and turns his attention to the rest of the room. Across the table, Romanov is looking bored, and next to her, Sam Wilson is watching him with an expression that seems to be hovering somewhere undecided between concern and approbation. The fucking _archer_ — Hawkeye? — is very deliberately concentrating on picking at a hangnail on his thumb, while on the other side of Rogers Tony Stark is trying to glare at James through a placid looking Bruce Banner. James ignores them all, and waits to be given his mission.

—

When the Soldier surrendered, it wasn’t to Captain America. That would have been easy; the Captain followed him all over Europe, and the Soldier knew he’d catch up eventually. But there was something about the Captain that unsettled him. It wasn’t that he didn’t know who would win, in a fight between them, even though that was true and in itself it ought to have been unsettling enough. It was that he didn’t know whether they would fight, if it came to it. The Captain cares about things other than winning, things the Soldier doesn’t understand, though he feels like maybe he’s supposed to. He has a lot of nightmares, and the one where he’s on the helicarrier again, feeling the bones of the Captain’s face mashing under his fist, isn’t the worst, but it is one of the more frequent, like of all the senseless violence he’s been a part of, this is what his mind struggles the most to comprehend. The Soldier didn’t know what he’d do if he had to face the Captain again, and it’s that— the _Winter Soldier_ , spinning out of control like he’s human, or something — that led him to surrender to Romanov, after making her promise not to take him to the Captain.

It’s been six months, and James knows the Captain’s still not over it, for all his smiles. James doesn’t understand Rogers, but he finds him pretty easy to read.

—

The mission is easy, so easy that any one of the Avengers could probably have taken it on their own. It’s a barely functioning Hydra cell just outside of Marrakech; there’s no need for five of them plus James. James could personally have completed this particular mission with one arm tied behind his back, and he might have a slightly confused memory but he’s not stupid. He know what this is. It’s a test; a test to see if James is really up to this, to check where his loyalties lie.

He’s not offended; he’d do the same thing if he was them. In all honesty, James can’t say loyalty is a feeling he understands all that well — it requires choice, doesn’t it? His skills, however, are never in doubt, so he keeps his head down and focuses on getting the job done. He finds a spot up high with his rifle and picks off Hydra operatives one by one. He gets more than one trying to sneak up on Captain America, and each time he does the Captain looks up and gives him a blinding grin, like James is a toddler taking his first steps. The others aren’t all so appreciative: he shoots a guy coming for Iron Man and Stark looks at him like he’s nothing more than an annoying fly. But James isn’t there to make friends; the important thing is that the mission is a success, and it is.

On the jet back, Rogers sits next to James. “Good to have you on my six again, Buck,” he says.

“James,” says James, and he spends the rest of the flight looking out the window so he doesn’t have to deal with Captain fucking America looking at him like he’s the answer to all his prayers.

—

Here’s the thing: James knows he’s Bucky Barnes, childhood bestie of Captain America, but he doesn’t fucking remember it.

He knows it must be true. He’s seen the pictures.

He knows, because Captain America broke into his cell and told him so.

He’d just appeared one day, wearing a furtive expression and the same scrubs as the hospital porter who delivered James’s lunch. “You were my best friend, Buck,” he’d said, and James had wondered where the food was. “We grew up together. You always looked out for me.”

“If you say so,” James had said, agreeably enough. He didn’t remember it; he still doesn’t remember it, but then, he never remembered half the things his handlers used to tell him he’d done. It doesn’t matter. History is written by the victors. He thinks someone told him that once, and it makes sense. Captain America has won, and now he gets to write the Soldier’s past the way he wants it to be.

But Rogers had looked disappointed with James’s response, like he was expecting James to agree more emphatically, or at least show an interest.

“If you want me to get you out of here, you just say the word,” he’d said. There’d been an earnest expression on his face. On anyone else, James would think it was fake. But even then he remembers thinking that maybe the Captain was just like that. “You can come back home with me, if you want.”

 _If you want_. At the time, James and his therapist had been working on want. What James wanted, if he was allowed to want. So far it’d been small things. Do you want the chicken or the fish? The orange jello or the green? Do you want to have a shower or stare at the wall some more? ‘Do you want to stay in your padded cell or escape with Captain America?’ seemed like a bigger question, but James had thought he knew the answer. He’d felt the same way about escaping with Captain America as he did about the green jello. “No, thank you,” he said.

The Captain’s still not over that, either.

—

James must have passed the test, because he gets sent on more missions with the Avengers. They’re still milk runs, mostly; jobs James could handle in his sleep. That’s fine; when they’re ready to really make the best use of their resources, he’ll be there; in the meantime, James just does what he’s told.

Captain America is on most of them. Captain America is an idiot with a death wish and so, despite the low difficulty rating, James still manages to save his life more than once.

“How have you lived so long?” James mutters, as he pulls Rogers out of the line of fire of a goddamn missile. It’s meant to be contemptuous, but the Captain just beams at him.

“Always had you to look out for me, Buck,” he says.

Of course.

James saves Iron Man’s life a couple times as well, but Stark isn’t particularly impressed. He still seems convinced that James is just waiting for the right moment to shoot him in the back, and spends every moment in James’s presence alternating between glaring like a petulant teenager and making bad jokes that James is sure are supposed to be cutting. The rest of the Avengers fall somewhere in the middle, either smiling at James encouragingly or eyeing him nervously. James ignores it, all of it; he’s got no interest in becoming a member of their club.

“Do you remember,” says Captain America one day, when they’re standing in a field in the middle of Nebraska waiting on their extraction team. “When we went on that trip upstate? When we were kids?”

“No,” says James, wearily, but Rogers just keeps on going.

“It was supposed to give us poor sickly city kids a taste of the country air. But of course, I was the sickliest of them all, and it turned out the country air was something I was deathly allergic to. Had to spend most of the day hiding on the bus, trying not to wheeze.”

“Let me guess,” says James, trying to imagine how perfect Bucky Barnes would have reacted to that. “I sat on the bus with you the whole time and held your hand.”

Rogers just laughs. “God no. You were all over the place. Climbing trees and swimming in the river and looking for frogs. I watched you out the window. But you snuck a frog back onto the bus for me, and when I threw up on the way home you were nice about it, even though you had to sit next to me and I stank.”

“Right,” says James. He’s not sure he understands why this story is important. “Are you trying to warn me not to sit next to you on the chopper?”

Rogers laughs again, like James is joking. He’s not. He really doesn’t want to be around vomit. He used to be sick sometimes, after they put him in the chair, and the smell of it still gives him the shakes.

Rogers plays the ‘do you remember?’ game on every mission. He doesn’t seem at all perturbed that James’s answer is always no.

—

Steve might be smiling a lot, but Sam’s no fool. That guy is not okay. Barely holding it together, would be Sam’s professional opinion, if Sam didn’t strictly refrain from forming professional opinions about his friends. Except in this case, Sam doesn’t think you need any training to spot Steve’s barely hidden emotional distress. Natasha’s certainly got him made (although Sam knows Natasha's been trained in emotional distress; only causing it, he’s pretty sure, rather than solving it), and even Bruce has been sending sympathetic glances across the conference room table. Steve’s been ignoring them, of course, because acknowledging the sympathy of others would mean acknowledging there’s something to be sympathetic about, and Steve is not going to do that anytime soon. 

Sam did his best to lower Steve’s expectations regarding the rehabilitation of the Winter Soldier, and when that inevitably failed, he made sure Steve got outside for his run as often as he could. He talked pointedly about how talk therapy had helped some of the guys he’d worked with at the VA, and when his hints fell flat, he outright offered to set Steve up a meeting with one of his old coworkers. But Steve had just smiled his blandest smile, the one he reserves for the press and the people who stop him for selfies when he’s getting coffee, and said, “Not really sure what we’d have to talk about,” like Sam’s someone who that smile would ever work on.

“You know, it’s okay to miss him,” Sam says.

“But he’s right here,” says Steve, with that same blank smile, and Sam thinks it’s only a matter of time before Captain America finally breaks.

—

Natasha faces her first mission alone with the Soldier with trepidation. Fear is not an emotion Natasha admits to, but the dread she felt crawling up her spine when she realised who was responsible for Fury’s supposed death is the closest she’s come in years, and the truth of that doesn’t go away just because Captain America wants it to. But while no one knows who the Soldier really is, Natasha knows she would rather fight with him than against him, so when she’s sent to babysit him on his next job she goes without complaint. After all, who is she to deny someone a second chance?

They’re sent to do recon on a Russian mobster who looks like he’s doing deals with Hydra. Their objective is to find out who the Hydra contact is, and why he’s contracting muscle out of Brighton Beach. It’s long days in close proximity, sitting in cars and waiting on rooftops, watching their mark come and go, but Natasha’s surprised to find she likes working with the Soldier — James, as he goes by these days. He’s focused, in a way she appreciates, in a way none of her other colleagues are. It’s normally Clint she gets sent on these kinds of missions with, and Natasha would probably do anything for Clint, but it only takes a few hours before he’s complaining of boredom. He passes the time with guessing games or long-winded descriptions of his dreams; makes her rank candy bars and pick whether she’d rather eat her own toenails or someone else’s hair. He slips off for ‘supplies’ and comes back with burgers, even though they’ve got perfectly good rations.

There’s none of that from James. He doesn’t talk, except to note the position of the target. She hands him protein bars at three hour intervals and he eats them mechanically, without lowering his binoculars. It’s refreshing. Natasha enjoys Clint’s company, she enjoys ribbing Steve and bantering with the team, she really does. But there’s a part of her that always makes that feel like an act, that can’t see how it’s any different from flirting with a guard to get information. It’s a relief to work with someone who admits no distractions, and who expects nothing from her but competency. Relaxing, even; like with James she can stop pretending to be human, and give herself over entirely to the task, to the cold, calculating part of her that’s always there, that knows how to get the job done. It’s fucked up, she knows, to think of yourself as less than human, to crave a break from trying to be one.

—

Clint thinks the Winter Soldier is terrifying. It’s kinda hot. Clint is mostly straight, but he’s man enough to admit that when you combine eyes like that with a death stare like _that_ , it makes him feel something. But then, Clint likes danger. He wouldn’t do this job otherwise, so he doesn’t know what the other Avengers are having such a fit about. 

Plus, the Soldier is good at what he does. On their last mission, Clint saw the Soldier make shots he’s not sure _he_ would have made, which never happens. Clint wants to have a competition, see who can go the furthest. He wants to see how the Winter Soldier gets on with a bow and arrow in his hands. The guy doesn’t talk much, it’s true, but that’s okay. Clint would quite happily just sit and watch the Soldier work for hours at a time. They can be the kind of bros that don’t need to talk much, beyond the occasional observation about the crosswind.

The fact that Clint hasn’t yet worked up the courage to meet the Soldier’s eye is just a minor stumbling block on the way to a beautiful friendship.

—

“He’s like the bear,” says Tony. “In the Reagan ads. Some people say it’s fine, other people say it’s actually a commie coming to kill us all. I think it’s the second one, and we should prepare ourselves.”

“So you’re Reagan, in this scenario,” says Natasha. “Figures.”

“I’ve read about Reagan,” says Steve. “I don’t think I like him.”

“Well you wouldn’t,” says Tony. “You’re practically a socialist.”

“I am a socialist,” says Steve. “Does that mean _I’m_ the bear?”

Tony ignores him. “Reagan gets a lot of flack, but he did some good things for this country. He ended the Cold War.”

“No, he didn’t,” says Natasha.

“How would you know?”

“I was there.”

By the way she says it, Steve doesn’t think she means ‘as a child’, or even just ‘as a witness to history’. It seems to unnerve Tony slightly, but he rallies.

“Well, he helped,” he says. “Because he took the bear seriously!”

“Bucky’s not a bear,” says Steve.

“It’s a metaphor,” says Tony. He sounds harried. “The point is, he could be dangerous.”

“Trust the billionaire to defend Reagan,” says Natasha. “I always had you pegged as ‘not that bad’ for a capitalist overlord, but I guess I was wrong.”

“You _defected_ ,” says Tony. “You abandoned communism and went to work for the capitalist overlords.”

“That’s a really mean way of putting it,” says Natasha, but she doesn’t sound that upset. She sounds like she’s enjoying winding Tony up. “I wouldn’t have done it for Reagan.”

“He told Gorbachev to tear down the wall and then Gorbachev _did_.”

“The people of Berlin tore down the wall, Tony,” says Natasha.

“Even I know that,” says Steve. “And I was frozen.”

“You know who probably wasn’t frozen?” says Tony, valiantly trying to get the conversation back on track.

“You weren’t,” says Natasha. “How is your knowledge of this so abysmal? What were you doing in the late eighties? Taking quaaludes and inventing internet pornography?”

“That was the nineties,” says Tony. “Coke rather than quaaludes. But you’re not far off. Anyway, can we talk about the Winter Soldier and how he’s going to kill us all while we sleep?”

“Hang on,” says Steve. “Wasn’t Reagan the one who sold arms to Iran in order to fund right-wing terror groups in Nicaragua because he didn’t like the government there?”

“Yes,” says Natasha. “Also he gave tax cuts to the rich and ignored a massive international health crisis because the people dying were nearly all either gay or drug users.”

“Yeah,” says Steve. “I don’t like Reagan.”

“I would like to clarify that I don’t like Reagan either,” says Tony. “I can understand how you might think that I did based on what I said before, but I don’t. I don’t actually like Reagan. I wasn’t old enough to vote for him but if I had been I wouldn’t have. I know that for sure, because my dad did vote for him and when I _was_ old enough to vote I voted exclusively for whoever would annoy my dad the most.”

“That’s nice, Tony,” says Steve.

“You weren’t old enough to vote in ‘84?” says Natasha. “You look like you were old enough to vote in ‘84.”

Tony looks indignant. 

“You don’t,” Steve says to Natasha.

“Hey, thanks pal, neither do you.”

Tony glowers at them both. “I’m just saying,” he says. “That maybe we should take a leaf out of Reagan’s book when it comes to security issues.”

“You think we should sell weapons to Iran?” says Steve. “I thought you were all done with arms dealing.”

“I _think,”_ says Tony, “we should be prepared in case Bucky Bear isn’t as cuddly as you'd like to believe.”

Natasha pulls a face at Steve. “He’s not wrong, Steve.”

Steve flinches, betrayed. He doesn’t want to talk about this. He really doesn’t want to talk about it with Tony, who’s been ready to believe the worst about Bucky from the beginning, but he doesn’t particularly want to talk about it with Natasha either, especially not when she’s wearing her pragmatic ‘let’s get real, Steve’ face.

“He’s fine,” says Steve. “His therapist says he’s fine.”

“His therapist talks to you?” says Tony.

“No,” says Steve.  The only time Bucky’s therapist has ever talked to Steve at all was the time she personally called Steve to lecture him about time, and space, and _pressure_ , when Steve had tried to get Bucky out of the facility they were keeping him in to come home with Steve, where he belonged. Bucky’s therapist doesn’t like Steve, he’s pretty sure. “She talks to Fury though, and Fury says he’s fine.”

“I think he’s probably fine,” says Natasha. “Assuming by fine we mean ‘not likely to kill us all’, rather than, you know, actually fine in a healthy, normal person way. But I also think it doesn’t hurt to be prepared.”

“Uhuh,” says Steve. “Well, okay, then, I’ll just leave you two to that.” They can prepare all they want. Steve’s going to see if Bucky wants to go try the new craft beer bar that’s opened up nearby. Sure, he’s said no the last two times Steve’s asked, but you never know, maybe third time’s the charm.

“Steve,” says Natasha, sounding exasperated.

Steve turns his head. “I’m not going to sit here and plot how to take down my best friend, Nat,” he says. Bucky is alive; Bucky is not in prison; Bucky no longer tries to kill Steve. Everything is therefore fine, and good, and Steve is _lucky_. He’s not going to do anything to jeopardize that luck, like entertain doubts.

Stark opens his mouth, but Natasha cuts him off. “Okay,” she says. “We’ll keep you out of it.”

It’s not quite the answer Steve wants, but he’ll take it.

He heads downstairs and knocks on Bucky’s door. Bucky answers; Bucky always answers when Steve knocks, and he always looks slightly like he wishes he hadn’t.

“Captain,” he says, warily.

“You can call me Steve, you know,” says Steve. “I’d prefer it, actually.”

Bucky just stares at him with a politely blank expression on his face. “How can I help you, Steve?”

Sometimes there’s a traitorous part of Steve that thinks he actually would prefer it if Bucky was still trying to kill him. “I was just wondering if you wanted to go for a drink,” he says. “At that bar I was talking about?”

Bucky stares at him some more. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he says, eventually. 

If Steve’s interrupted Bucky doing something, there’s no sign of it. No tv noise in the background, no music. He’s wearing trackpants and a cosy sweater, his long hair pulled back in a bun. 

“Why not?” asks Steve.

Bucky just shrugs, and Steve wants to punch something. Instead, he pastes on his best war bonds smile and says, “Some other time, then.”

One day, Bucky’ll say yes. Steve just has to hang on till then.

—

“I don’t want to be Captain America’s friend,” James tells his therapist. He still sees his therapist, even though he’s no longer in the padded cell, because ‘recovery isn’t always linear’, and ‘even people who haven’t been prisoners for decades need a little help sometimes’ and ‘regular therapy was one of the conditions of your release from state custody, James’. 

“Okay,” says his therapist. Molly, her name is. James thinks he dated a Molly once. He can’t picture her face, but he has a vision of a halo of golden ringlets bobbing up and down above his cock. It takes him by surprise, this image, so incongruous, so _pleasant_ , really, compared to the grisly flashes of death and dismemberment his ‘memory’ usually supplies. But of course, this Molly is nothing like that, grey-haired and British. British like Agent Carter, but Molly’s accent doesn’t make her sound like she’s got a stick up her ass, and she’s round and soft where Carter is (was?) sharp.

Margaret Carter: founder and Director of SHIELD. James knows this, but he doesn’t remember meeting her, and he doesn’t know why the thought of her leaves a bitter taste in his mouth, a mix of jealousy and regret.

Similarly, James doesn’t entirely understand why the sight of Steve Rogers fills him with dread, he just knows that it does. James and his therapist are working through the umpteen different mysteries of James’s psyche, and while that one’s definitely on the list, it’s only about halfway up, below James’s tendency to scream in the night, his uncertain loyalties, and, apparently, acquiring a name. James isn’t sure how the name got so high up, but he leaves the order of the list to his therapist — although he has a feeling this disinterest is itself something he’s going to be expected to ‘unpack’ in the not-to-distant future.

James’s earliest memories of Rogers are older than the 18-month period he can confidently account for in any logical or coherent fashion, and if the things they say about him are true, then these weren’t their earliest encounters either. At some point there was a first meeting, one James can’t remember, before the day on the bridge or the dive into the river or that morning in the snowy forest (which snowy forest?). James can’t remember, and so he can’t pinpoint where the feeling comes from, but something about Rogers just makes his heart sink like a lead balloon whenever he sees him. 

He’s tried prodding at it, out of curiosity, but that just elicits a squirmy feeling in the pit of his belly, and he eventually he always shrinks away. It’s a feeling like… like he’s let Rogers down somehow, or he’s going to. Like he knows Rogers is going to want something he can’t give.

“He’s an idiot,” says James.

“Okay,” says Molly.

“But isn’t that why I’m here?” James asks helplessly.

Molly raises her eyebrows. “We might need to unpack that a bit, James. What makes you say that?”

“The Winter Soldier is…” James takes a breath. “A threat, an enemy. Not someone you save. Bucky Barnes, Captain America’s best friend? Him, you try and save.”

“I’m not going to be naive and suggest that the United States government is paying for these sessions just because it’s the right thing to do,” said Molly. “But I don’t think they’re doing it to stop Captain America from getting lonely, either. I know he’s a national icon, but I’m very expensive.”

James gives a half-hearted smile.

“They’re doing it because they’re getting a highly skilled professional in return. Are you doing your job?”

“Yeah,” says James.

“Are you following all of the other conditions of your agreement?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, well, beyond that, you don’t owe anyone anything. Not even Steve Rogers.”

James pulls a face. It’s easy to say that, but harder to believe it. If he’s not here to be Bucky Barnes, then why is he here? He’s not needed on the missions he’s sent on, he doesn’t add much to the team. The Winter Soldier had always had a purpose; so, it seemed, had Bucky. James doesn’t.

—

If James is honest — and who knows, really, if he is — he wasn’t actually in the padded cell all that long. He only brings it up because it seems to bother Rogers, although why that is James couldn’t say. He’d expected a lot worse, himself. When you’re stupid enough to make ‘don’t take me to Captain America’ your only term of surrender, you don’t expect _padding_.

As far as he could tell, they’d stuck him in there because they didn’t really know what else to do with him. Kept him under observation for a few days, while he napped and stared at the wall and ate the food they pushed through a slot in the door. Finally, someone was brave enough to be in the same room as him, and he got the interrogation he’d been waiting for. 

Except it wasn’t; not really. Some of the questions were what he expected — they asked him about Hydra, about what he knew and what he’d done. But they seemed oddly preoccupied with his thoughts rather than his actions. They asked him whether he knew who he was, why he turned himself in, what he _expected_ from them. He was perplexed by these questions, unable to understand why they cared. “Got tired of running,” he said. Got tired of seeing the sad expression on the Captain’s face whenever he got away. “Do whatever you think is best.”

Strangely, what they thought was best was not putting him down like a dog, or putting him back in cryo, or wiping his memories and starting again. They didn’t stick him in some dungeon, never to see the light of day. Instead, they gave him soft pyjamas and a room with a window. The interrogations continued, but they only got weirder, the questions more baffling. Why did you do the thing you barely remember doing? Why did you do the thing you just did? What do you want to do next? How do you _feel_ about the things you’ve done, and the things you’re doing, and the things you want to do? He didn’t know how to answer them, he didn’t know what they wanted to hear, but it didn’t seem to matter. Everything he said just got a nod and a scribbled note on a clipboard.

Sometimes — in fact, most of the time — there was an unlocked door in his room that led to a corridor that led to a bigger room, with a whole row of windows; shabby furniture, a ping-pong table, and a bookshelf full of well-thumbed paperbacks. There was an old TV in the corner, a big, square, silver one, and a DVD-player with a stack of scratched disks that started skipping whenever you got to the good part. James has, regrettably, seen the first half of _Flubber_ five times and he’s read all of the Harry Potter books. But mostly he would lie on his back on one of the threadbare sofas and look out the window at the summer-blue sky.

James misses it, actually.

—

It’s only a matter of time before it all ends in tears; James knows this and yet when it does it still catches him by surprise. Not the fact that it’s his fault, because of course it is, but how exactly, he manages to fuck everything up. As far as he remembers he’s never been a man with much to say, and yet somehow it’s his mouth that does it; not a gun or a knife, just his words, and a look on Steve’s face that’s far worse than the time James shot him in the gut. 

—

How it happens is this: James is cooking dinner. 

James cooks dinner in the communal kitchen most nights. He doesn’t _want_ to cook in the communal kitchen but he doesn’t have much choice. Stark hasn’t seen fit to put a kitchen in his own quarters. The Winter Soldier isn’t to be trusted with naked flame alone, apparently. Or a microwave. Which is bullshit, on account of how James is trusted with a pretty big rifle everytime the Avengers need someone to watch their backs.

He’d order takeout — he does, sometimes — but it’s silly, to spend money on food when he’s perfectly capable of making it himself. James isn’t short on money; he gets a pension and he doesn’t pay rent (benefits of court-ordered accommodation, he supposes), but — it’s the principle, isn’t it? And besides, James likes cooking. He’s trying to develop hobbies that aren’t killing people; Molly reckons it’ll do him good. James is sceptical, but it turns out his knife skills are just as good for dicing onions and filleting fish as they are for gutting a man, so why not?

It’s fine. It’s mostly fine. It would be fine, except Rogers is _always fucking here_ , following James around like an overgrown labrador, and James can’t escape the hopefulness that comes off him in waves. It’s like Rogers thinks if he just smiles hard enough, James will remember, and Bucky’ll be back. It’s no fun being a constant fucking disappointment, James thinks, and if Rogers smiles any harder he’s going to crack in two.

James has been thinking about what Molly said. About the idea that he doesn’t owe anyone anything. It’s an interesting thought. James keeps playing with in his head; gingerly at first, and then more boldly, poking it and prodding it with his mind like a loose tooth, testing it to see if it sets off any explosions. What if James doesn’t have to be who Rogers wants him to be? What if he’s a man without a past, without a score to settle, without sins to atone for? Not a weapon, not Captain America’s sidekick, but something entirely unknown? 

Tonight though, Captain America is hovering by his elbow as he slices and dices his carrots whether James wants him to or not. 

“Smells great, Buck,” Rogers says, and James has to stop himself from rolling his eyes. “Just like your ma’s stew. You remember that?”

“No,” says James, just like he has every other time Rogers asked the question, and if it sounds a little petulant this time, well. Tough. James doesn’t remember his ma, let alone his ma’s stew, and for once he’d like to be able to cook dinner without someone pointing out the parts of him that are missing. What if, he thinks rebelliously, he doesn’t care? What if he’s happy for those parts to stay gone? It sounds callous, perhaps, to say you don’t care if you ever remember your own mother, but it’s hard to work up much concern when you’re not convinced she ever existed.

So. Here they are. The kitchen, a pot of carrot and ginger soup that smells nothing like any kind of stew James has ever encountered, and Rogers. For all it sounds like the solution to a fucked-up game of Clue, there’s no reason yet to believe it’s going to end with blood on the floor. Sure, there’s something bubbling up inside him that he doesn’t quite understand, but James is prepared to just grit his teeth and get on with it, just like every other time Rogers has cornered him with his memories of Bucky Barnes. 

Things start to go off course when half the Avengers show up at once, enough takeout between them to feed an invading horde. Which is pretty much what it is, as far as James is concerned. He’d been hovering in an air duct for a good hour waiting for the kitchen to come free. First Banner had made himself a smoothie and meticulously cleaned down all the surfaces, and then just as James had been considering lowering himself down, Hawkeye had shown up and made a mess of it again, indiscriminately shoving food in the direction of his mouth and letting a truly shocking amount simply fall straight out again. Only once he’d left did James drop down and claim the kitchen for himself. Except, of course, he’d had a window of solitude barely ten minutes long before Rogers showed up with his puppy eyes, and now the place was full of goddamn superheros.

It’s not like Rogers doesn’t have his own kitchen. James knows Rogers has his own kitchen because James uses it sometimes, when he knows Rogers’s not there. Rogers has given him unlimited access to his rooms, because Rogers’s got no sense of self-preservation, and James figures that if Rogers is stupid enough to let the Winter Soldier come and go as he pleases, then he’s lucky the worst thing the Winter Soldier has done is get rice stuck to the bottom of one of his pans (James left it to soak; he’s not actually a monster).

“Steve,” booms Thor, peering round a towering stack of pizza boxes, an enthusiastic grin on his face. “We got many pizzas. I am particularly desirous of trying the ‘frenzy of meats’; Clint says it is delicious.”

James looks at the top box. _Try our new MEAT FRENZY_ , it says, in large red letters. _Bacon, pepperoni, ham, sausage, chicken and ground beef. Can YOU handle the FRENZY?_

Hawkeye gives him a thumbs up; Natasha rolls her eyes. “It’s really not,” she says.

James stirs his soup and fights the urge to jump back up into the ceiling. His carrots aren’t cooked; the flavours haven’t had a chance to properly develop. He’s not abandoning his dinner just because some people came in.

“Hey man,” says Sam, in an even tone, and James realises he’s talking to him. Sam always talks to James like he’s trying to defuse a bomb. “You joining us?”

James concentrates on his soup and not the way Rogers has stiffened next to him with poorly concealed excitement. “Wasn’t planning on it,” he says casually, like the thought doesn’t fill him with dread.

“That’s cool,” says Sam. “But you’re always welcome if you change your mind.”

“Uhuh,” says James. A sour note has crept into his voice without his say-so; he’s being petty now. But it’s still avoidable, the scene that’s coming. If James _is_ a bomb Sam’s not the one who lights the fuse, even if he doesn’t manage to stamp it out either. James can handle Sam, and Natasha, and Clint, and Thor. He can handle Banner, who’s sitting placidly in the corner, shooting only the occasional nervous glance at James, like he can sense James’ mood. And he can handle Rogers. He’s _been_ handling Rogers.

It’s only when fucking Stark walks in that James realises things are truly heading south.

He’s wearing a welding visor pushed back, like he’s forgotten it’s there, and he’s staring at a tablet in his hands. “Bruce, baby, I’ve done a scan and the numbers on this thing are a little wack. You wanna come take a look? Ooh, pepperoni, don’t mind if I do.” Then he clocks James, standing by the stove, and pulls a face. “Who invited the murder bot?” he says.

James doesn’t react, just sprinkles salt over his soup — it could do with another five minutes, but it’s pretty much done, and James can recognise when it’s time to make a tactical retreat — but Rogers does, of course.

“Don’t call him that, Tony,” says Rogers, his voice dangerous. James recognises it as his ‘I don’t like bullies’ voice. He’s heard it a few times by now; the Captain seems to assume nearly anyone who talks to James is a bully unless proven otherwise.

“Why not?” says Stark. “He’s made of metal, and he kills people.”

And just like that, James is _done_. The only people he’s killed lately have been actively trying to harm Tony fucking Stark. He’s not sure what he’s more sick of: people trying to punish him for the Winter Soldier’s crimes, or Rogers’ desperate attempt to pretend they never happened — but whichever it is, he’s had enough. The powder’s lit.

Before Rogers can reply, James interrupts. “Listen, Stark,” he says, everyone in the room stares at him, surprised, like they forgot he could talk. “I’m real sorry about your parents. I’d probably be able to be more sincere about it if I could remember doing it, but you say I did it and I ain’t got any reason to doubt you.”

Stark’s glaring, but for once he seems lost for words. Rogers has a frown on his face, like he’s not sure he approves of where this is going, but James doesn’t care. James _doesn’t care_. Something inside him’s been let loose.

“So, sorry about that,” he continues, and even he’s surprised that he doesn’t really sound like he’s sorry at all. “But I don’t want to be here anymore than you want me here. I didn’t ask to be a part of your _team_ , but I’ve got to work off my debt to society somehow, and apparently watching your six is how they want me to do it. Don’t worry though, your little social club is of no interest to me. I’ll leave you all to it.”

It’s the most words James can remember saying in a row, but he takes a deep breath and doesn’t waver, just strides towards the elevator, soup abandoned behind him.

Okay; so. He’s pulled the pin, burnt the bridge. It’s done.

“Bucky, wait.”

Or maybe it’s not done, because Steve Rogers cannot take a goddamn hint. James turns on his heel, and finds Rogers has followed him. He grits his teeth and takes a step towards Rogers, so he’s close enough there’s doubt Rogers can hear him.

“You need to listen up too, sweetheart,” says James. He feels a certain rush as he says it. He’s about to be unspeakably cruel; he can feel it. It’s a new sensation. The Winter Soldier wounded and maimed and killed with a ruthless efficiency, but he never took any pleasure in it. His blows were intended to get the job done; nothing more. But James is watching his fall with a sick satisfaction; he’s discovered how to be mean. 

“I know I used to be your boyfriend or whatever,” he continues, and he doesn’t know exactly where the words are coming from, but they’re there all right. “But whatever we had is long gone, pal. I get that you're real sad about it, but you need to get it through your head that I don’t know you, and I don’t remember any of it. Don’t. Call. Me. Bucky.”

Steve’s face crumples and the elevator dings. James steps in, doesn’t look back.

He’s pretty sure it would have been cleaner to use a knife.

—

James is not Bucky Barnes. He’s not the Winter Soldier either. He’s a blank slate. A whole new person. He knows he can shoot pretty straight and he doesn’t like green jello; he knows he thinks Harry Potter is stupid and he thinks he might be able to speak Mandarin. Beyond that he’s a mystery. He doesn’t know himself, and he sure as fuck doesn’t know Steve Rogers.

Here’s the thing: James hasn’t been entirely truthful. 

He _doesn’t_ know Steve Rogers, but he does remember him. A little. It’s like a pebble stuck in his shoe, or an itch he can’t quite reach. There’s an image of Steve rattling around in his head, but James can’t quite connect it to anything. It doesn’t matter; it doesn’t make a difference. 

On their next mission, Rogers doesn’t sit next to James on the plane. He sits as far away as possible, and James is relieved.

 


	2. Chapter 2

“No way, Cap,” said Morita. “No way in hell.”

“It’ll never work,” said Gabe, shaking his head.

“I’m the least likely to get hurt,” Steve tried.

“Maybe, but you miss and we’re all in trouble,” said Morita. “You gotta send Sarge.”

“Sure as shit none of us is gonna make that shot,” said Gabe. 

“It is the only way, Capitaine,” put in Denier.

Steve felt his face heating up with frustration. He’d finally been given a real job to do and his new team didn’t trust him to do it. “It’s an unacceptable risk,” he said.

“I don’t like it either, Captain, but Barnes knows what he’s doing,” said Monty.

“Fellas,” said Bucky, shooting a meaningful glance around the tent, “Wanna give the Captain and me a minute?”

The team filed out, Denier muttering darkly in French. Steve glared at Bucky. “You going to disobey a direct order from your commanding officer, Sergeant?”

“Dunno,” said Bucky, picking dirt from under his fingernails. “You gonna give out stupid orders, Captain?”

“Buck.”

Bucky looked up. “Steve.”

“You know I can’t let you do this.”

Bucky sighed. “You’re a lot of things now, Stevie, but a marksman you ain’t. If you want this done, you’re gonna have to.”

“I can shoot fine,” said Steve. Bucky snorted derisively. “It’s _dangerous_ , Buck.”

“Pal, there’s a goddamn war on.”

“You ain’t the one who’d have to write a letter to your goddamn mother,” Steve said. “How do you think that’ll go, huh? Hey Winnie, sorry I haven’t had a chance to write in a while. Just dropping a line to say my first go as Captain went wrong and your beloved only son is _dead_.”

“Leave my ma out of this, will ya?” Bucky said. “And calm down. Jesus, Steve, why do you always have to be such a goddamn drama queen? It’ll be fine.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Maybe not. But pal, you’re acting like I didn’t sign up for this. It might be your first go of things, but it ain’t mine.”

“Your last go you got _captured_ ,” said Steve. 

“That’s ‘cos you weren’t there,” Bucky said, matter-of-fact. “We’re better together, you and I. You know it.”

Steve couldn’t argue with that. It’s what he was thinking when he asked Bucky to join his team, after all. It’s just that it’s one thing to ask your friend to follow you into the jaws of death; it’s another to actually let him do it. When it came to the point, Steve found himself thinking more and more about how Bucky looked when he rescued him: the corpse-like grey of his skin, the glassy eyes, the next-to-nothing weight of him as he’d leaned into Steve for support. (He’d never done that before; he’d never done it since.) It was all too easy to imagine what might have happened, if he’d only been a little delayed.

“I suppose,” he said, reluctantly.

“Right,” said Bucky. “So you gotta let us stick together on this one too, okay?”

Steve sighed. Bucky slung an arm around his neck. “Listen,” he said. “It’s like you always used to say when I would fuss about you going back to work after you’d been sick. Can’t wrap me in cotton wool forever.”

“Nobody was _shooting_ at me,” said Steve.

“Came pretty close that time you got yourself a commission to paint that gangster’s lady,” said Bucky. “I thought we were gonna get run out of town, the way you did her nose.”

“That’s what it looked like!”

“Someday,” said Bucky, “You’ll learn that the truth ain’t worth dying for. Now, let’s take a look at this map and see if we can’t figure out a way to get this mission done together.”

—

Steve wakes in the night, drenched in sweat, and takes great gulps of air.

 _Sorry, Winnie_ , he thinks.

 _I don’t think I can do this_ , he thinks.

 _Jesus, Steve, why do you always have to be such a goddamn drama queen_ , he thinks.

—

Natasha’s on another stake-out with the Soldier. The Russian mobster they were following has led them to a short, slimy-looking man who goes by the name of Vincent Cliff, and a small warehouse by the Coney Island railway yard. What’s going on in there they haven’t yet established, but it’s well-guarded, mostly by burly Russians armed with more sophisticated weaponry than the local mafia usually carries. Hydra, definitely, but small fry, as far as they can tell. Cliff’s not named in any of the Shield/Hydra files, but then, he’s not named in any government files either: he doesn’t really exist. 

They’re left with little choice but to watch the warehouse and see what happens. It’s tedious, a quality which isn’t lessened by the knowledge that if they brought in some back-up they could have the whole thing cleaned out in minutes. But a two-bit Hydra cell trading weapons for security is not enough to bring in the big guns—the Avengers are short on resources themselves, in these post-Shield times. Or so Fury says; Natasha thinks it’s more likely he wants to let things run their course for a while, see if they can’t reel in some bigger fish. The cell is small and disorganised, just like most of the ones they’ve encountered since the fall of Shield, but Hydra’s leaders haven’t just dropped off the face of the earth. There’s a chance there’ll be a thread here they can follow. Otherwise, in Natasha’s opinion, sending two people out on multiple stealth missions to spare sending five on a single take-down is a pretty false economy.

Technically, of course, Natasha and James could shut it down on their own, but Natasha doesn’t want to think about the drama that will ensue if Steve Rogers finds out there’s Hydra in his beloved Brooklyn and he’s not allowed to personally eradicate it. Or at least that’s what she says to James. The truth is there’s a protocol that says no one goes into a Hydra stronghold with James alone, in case it’s a trap. James isn’t allowed on a Hydra clean-up team unless the team is capable of subduing the Winter Soldier gone rogue. Natasha’s pretty sure Steve doesn’t know about the protocol; Steve would probably be more outraged about the protocol than about Hydra in Brooklyn. As far as Natasha can tell, Steve’s outrage just seems to get him lied to a lot. 

Officially, James doesn’t know about the protocol either. When Natasha explains about Steve and Hydra bases in Brooklyn he frowns for a moment, and then there’s just the barest hint of an eyeroll. But maybe it’s about Steve being ridiculous and not the indignity of not being trusted to take care of an extremely under-resourced Hydra cell. Either way, whatever the emotion is it’s only there for a second before James shrugs and goes back to staring, motionless, at the base’s north-west entrance.

They’ve been perched on top of this empty railway car, watching, for two hours and nothing’s happened. Natasha is getting restless, which never used to happen. Restless and bored: a deadly combo for a covert operative.  She yawns; James ignores her. She stretches; James remains deadly still. Natasha wants a burger; she wants to ask James if he’d rather go on a stake-out with Bruce in full green Hulk glory, or Tony. None of these things are relevant to the mission at hand, but it’s okay, she decides: the Winter Soldier is focusing on the mission enough for the both of them.

He’s like her, is the thing. That’s what had worried her, back when Steve had said a man with a metal arm had shot their boss. Not that he was unpredictable, because he’s not. It’s that he’s just like her, but stronger; none of the softness she’s let creep in since she came to the west.

Caring about others isn’t a weakness, a voice in her head chides, one that sounds a lot like Steve. And it’s true that Steve, at least, welds his heart like a sword, his conviction that the world is worth saving giving him the strength to save it, again and again. Natasha was with him, when he went looking for this man he calls Bucky, and she knows that nobody who saw that could say love had made Captain America weak. And yet Natasha also knows she’ll always have that niggle, that part of her that believes people are a distraction, that emotions are foibles at best and hazards at worst.

“Cliff approaching from the west,” James says, and Natasha switches her attention back to the task at hand.

Cliff is indeed walking towards the warehouse, flanked by a man in a pinstripe suit—not a local; more Savile Row than Little Odessa. Blond, medium height, slight build. Pointy teeth, subtle fake tan, the expensive kind.

“Who’s that with him?” Natasha asks. Anyone who’d met the Winter Soldier would certainly be a person of interest, but so far James either hasn’t recognised anyone or he hasn’t felt motivated to share.

“No idea,” says James. 

“Hmmm.” Natasha snaps a few shots of the pair; maybe they’ll get lucky and the new guy will show up on a watchlist somewhere.

Both men enter the warehouse, leaving the yard empty once more. Leaving James and Natasha with nothing to do but wait.

She considers leaning into her weird mood; becoming Sam for the evening. _So, you wanna talk about what happened the other night? When you made Captain America cry?_ But no, delving those particular depths is a task best left to the professionals. Everyone should stick to their strengths, and Natasha’s not cut out to be a therapist the same way Steve’s not cut out for undercover work and Clint’s dog’s not cut out for guard duty.

So it’s James, surprisingly, that breaks the silence next.

“Is it true,” he says, without turning his head away from his scope, “that you don’t know who you are?”

Natasha’s not startled because Natasha doesn’t get startled, not even when previously uncommunicative assassins start asking personal questions. “I know the important things,” she says. “I don’t think a genuine birth certificate’s gonna tell me who I am.” Natasha’s wondered about it, of course she has. But none of the most likely options are earth-shattering. Her parents were poor and vulnerable, or they were dead, and she was plucked out of some orphanage somewhere. Or she was bred in a lab and she never had parents, not really. Any of these could be true, but knowing which one is won’t change anything.

James mulls on that for a moment—or at least, Natasha thinks he does. His face is still hidden by the scope and isn’t giving anything away. She feels an unexpected twinge of sympathy; a genuine birth certificate, of sorts, is all James has got. A name, and Steve, and a pile of bodies. The rest will come, she wants to tell him, but that’s too much for one spy to say to another.

“You used to work for them. You changed sides.” His voice, she’s noticed, is starting to take on a little local flavour. _Wo-erk._ She wonders whether that’s the Soldier, blending in, or something else.

“Yes,” she says.

“Why?”

Natasha can’t see James’s face, so instead she studies his back. Is she imagining it, or is there a coil of tension there that wasn’t before? A slight hunching of the shoulders? Or has he just been like that the whole time, concentrating hard? She can’t tell; she hasn’t been paying close enough attention. _Not good enough_ , says that voice she mostly ignores.

She wonders what answer James is looking for. It’s not a question you ask out of idle curiosity; it’s not a question people like them ask at all. But then, neither do they pick sides. They just do what they’re told. Is that what he wants to hear? It was an act of rebellion, a quest for freedom?

Natasha may have changed sides, but she’s still not American, not really, not deep down at the root of her. She believes in freedom, sure, but she’s not fanatical about it. It’s not the only thing that matters. Give me liberty or give me death is a nice enough slogan for a revolutionary, but to Natasha it seems like in modern America the ones dying for it are mostly school kids and the chronically ill. And, of course, the occasional covert operative.

The first couple of times Clint had tried to turn her she’d just laughed at him. The idea that his ramblings about ‘choice’ and ‘becoming a force for good’ could stir some kind of feeling in her had seemed quaint, almost cute in its naivety. But he’d just shrugged his shoulders and grinned, as if to say, ‘better luck next time’, and the next time he ran into her in the field he tried again, and again. It was his persistent optimism that intrigued her; she felt herself being drawn in, let him engage her for longer and longer. She started thinking about the things he said even when he wasn’t there, started questioning the things her superiors told her. And eventually, one day, he asked her to jump and she couldn’t remember why she shouldn’t.

It wasn’t freedom; it wasn’t because she wanted to clean her slate. It was because Clint smiled, and held out his hand like a friend, and Natasha had never had one of those before.

But Natasha’s never told anyone that, and she’s not about to bare her soul to the Winter Soldier on a top of an empty train carriage in Brooklyn. Secrets are Natasha’s specialty, and she didn’t get to where she is today by spilling them to the first guy who asks.

“What’s it to you?” she says instead.

“Nothing,” says James. “I’m just curious what makes you pick. How you know one side is better than the other.”

Ah. He says it casually, like it really is nothing, but of course it’s not. It’s everything, it’s the whole ballgame. 

“I don’t think you can know,” Natasha says. “Steve would say it’s about values, of course. About fighting for what you think is right. But not everyone can see right and wrong as clearly as Steve can.”

James snorts.

“I didn’t have many morals when I crossed over,” Natasha admits, because maybe James deserves a few truths. “They came later. It was that they offered me something the other guys couldn’t.” 

“So self-interest.”

“Sure.” Natasha knows this is her opportunity to persuade him and she’s fucking it up. She should say something about good and evil and how the good guys are the ones who don’t use an electric chair to try and brainwash you into submission. But it would sound false, coming from her. None of the Avengers are perfect and yeah, Shield turned out to be Hydra and Fury lies all the time, to everyone, and yet Natasha knows she’s fighting for the right people because they’re the ones who let her choose. And so she’s gonna extend the same courtesy to James. Let him figure it out for himself, because what real reason has he got to believe her, anyway?

“You find a better answer, you let me know,” she says. 

James doesn’t say anything to that, just grips his scope and continues to watch.

“Who told you that, anyway?” she asks. “About me switching sides?” 

“Barton,” says James. “He’s always hanging about the firing range with his... _arrows_.” He pronounces that with disdain, like he can’t think of anything that belongs less on a firing range. “Last week after Stark was being… his usual charming self, Barton told me not to listen to the ‘haters’, because you used to work for the bad guys too, and you’re the best.’”

Natasha laughs. She shouldn’t be surprised. Everyone other than Steve has been avoiding the hell out of James, but of course Clint’s secretly been trying to befriend him.

“Clint’s smarter than he looks,” she says. She looks down at the warehouse, where nothing is happening. “Listen, we could be here awhile. You want a burger?”

—

It’s true, Barton did say that. But James already knew. He remembers a flash of red hair; he remembers fighting alongside the Black Widow and then against her. He remembers training her; he remembers shooting her.

—

“Steve,” says Sam, once he can breathe well enough to make it sound stern and not ridiculous. “You wanna talk about anything? Only you’d lapped me three times before I’d gone a mile and you didn’t even wave obnoxiously as you did it.”

They’re walking back from their morning run around the compound. Sam usually aims for three laps, Steve does ten. Today, Sam had to stop counting because Steve was making him dizzy. Steve is sweaty and pink-cheeked in a way he only normally gets after a tough fight, but he’s recovering fast. He chugs water from his bottle and then says, “If I’d waved every time I passed you it would have taken me twice as long.”

“Yeah, okay, Captain Flash, you run fast, I run slow,” says Sam, with what he considers to be superhuman patience. “But is there any particular reason you decided to try and break the land speed record today?”

“The Flash wasn’t a Captain,” says Steve, like this is something that matters.

Sam stops walking. “C’mon, man,” he says, and Steve stops too. His face looks mulish, his hair sticking up every which way in a most un-Captain America-like fashion. Sam doesn’t really know what the hell to say next.

What they witnessed the other night was some real take-no-prisoners boundary-setting on Barnes’s part, and Sam was honestly impressed. Standing up for yourself is hard to do at the best of times, never mind when you’re recovering from decades of brainwashing, and if Sam was Barnes’s therapist he’d consider what he witnessed to be a major breakthrough. But Sam isn’t Barnes’s therapist, he’s Steve’s friend, and there's no denying Barnes set his boundaries by hammering a stake right into Steve's heart.

Sam shivers, sweat cooling on his skin. It’s December; it’s cold; they’d set out just past dawn. He doesn’t know if now is the right time for the come-to-Jesus moment he’s imagining; he doesn’t know if there’ll ever be a right time.

“Look,” he says. “About Barnes…”

“What about him?” Steve says, impatiently. 

“Steve.”

“He’s made his feelings clear, Sam. I’m not sure what you want me to do.”

“Talk to me maybe?” Sam says. “Instead of starting a forest fire with your feet.”

Silence.

“You’re allowed feelings too, you know.” 

Steve swallows, looks off into the distance. “I was just trying to help,” he says, finally. “I’d do anything to help, if only he’d let me. If only he’d tell me how.”

“I know,” says Sam. He does; everyone does. The whole world knows the lengths Steve would go to for James Buchanan Barnes. “But Steve, I think he did. He said he needs space.”

“But—”

“Nah, no buts,” says Sam. “Plenty of people in his situation wouldn’t have a clue what they need. If he does, you’ve got to respect it.”

Steve’s stubborn expression has been replaced with something more hangdog. Sam sighs. “I know they say that when your friend is struggling you need to reach out and be there for them or whatever,” he says. “And you should and you have, but you can’t force it. If he’s not reaching back there's only so much you can do.” 

That's the tricky bit, the bit they never tell you. All the love in the world can't fix the mess in someone else's head.

“So I’m just supposed to do nothing?” Steve asks.

“Pretty much,” says Sam. “Until he tells you otherwise.”

Steve frowns.

Sam sighs. “Steve,” he says. “What James did? Standing up to you, telling you what he wanted? That was a good sign. For someone who’s been through what he’s been through, that’s major.”

“He was _angry_.”

“I know,” says Sam. It was awesome, he thinks. “Aren’t you?”

Steve looks him in the eye, finally. “Sometimes,” he says, “I feel so angry I want to burn the whole thing down.”

“What thing?”

“All of it. The world.”

Sam smiles. “Yeah,” he says. “I know the feeling.”

—

“I want a kitchen,” says James, when Stark finally opens the door to his workshop. James hasn’t been banging on it or anything. He doesn’t need to: there’s a camera _right there_ , and Stark’s computer tells him everything that goes on in this building. James had knocked once, to be polite, and then waited patiently for Stark to give up on trying to ignore him. It took less than five minutes.

“Oh yeah?” says Stark. He purses his lips and crosses his arms: unimpressed. “Well, I want my mom to not be dead. We can’t always get what we want.”

James knows that better than Tony fucking Stark. Billionaire fucking playboy probably had never been denied anything he wanted until James killed his parents; Stark should really be _thanking_ James for introducing some character-building setbacks into his life—but no, whoever James is he’s not _that_ , and he immediately feels guilty for the thought.

Whoever James is, it feels like ‘we can’t always get what we want’ is a truth written—written, carved, fucking branded—on his soul, but today he’s here to test out how far it goes; to try his hand at being someone who does get what they want, even if it’s only sometimes. He can’t bring back Stark’s mother, he can’t undo what he’s done. But he’s got something else to offer. 

“I’m prepared to trade,” James says. “I’ll let you look at the arm.”

Stark stills; James can see he’s caught his interest. He knows Stark has wanted to look at the arm for as long as he’s known there is an arm, and if he’d just _asked_ , then James might have let him, but he hadn’t. And James is developing a personality, apparently; his generosity of spirit (complaisance) is starting to get crowded out by other traits (opportunism, greed, pig-headedness). 

“Define ‘look at’,” says Stark.

“Whatever you like,” says James. “Scans, tests, hell, I’ll even let you pull it apart, so long as you have it working again by the time you’re done.”

“How much time have I got?”

James thinks. “Three hours.”

“No deal,” says Stark. “I was thinking more like three days.”

James grimaces. He knows he can’t handle being poked and prodded for that long, not by Stark. “No deal.”

Stark looks frustrated; he wants this, James can tell, even more now he’s had the possibility dangled in front of him. “How about,” he says, thinking, “one hour, once a week?”

“For how many weeks?” says James. 

Stark shrugs. “Until I get bored, or you don’t need the kitchen anymore.”

It’s a shit deal. James knows it’s a shit deal. He could have this whole thing done with in a few days if he’d just been prepared to grin and bear it; instead he’s signing on for the foreseeable future. An ongoing commitment. He’s racking up a lot of those, what with his therapy sessions and his contract to kill people for the United States Government. But his therapist does want him to socialise more; she’d said he didn’t have to be friends with Captain America but he really should find _someone_ to talk to, other than her. Maybe if he tells her he’s spending an hour a week in Tony Stark’s company she’ll be pleased, give him a fucking break for once.

“Fine,” says James.

“Starting now?” says Stark. He’s grinning smugly; it sets James’s teeth on edge.

“Starting when I see my fucking kitchen,” says James. “I want an electric oven but gas burners. And a stand mixer.”

“Sure you wouldn’t prefer a coal range?” says Stark. James glares at him. Stark raises his hands. “Okay, okay. Only the best in modern kitchen appliances.”

—

When James gets back from his next mission, his rooms have had an extension tacked on. There’s a shiny stainless steel gas burner, a double oven, a stack of cast iron skillets and saucepans of various sizes. There’s a Kitchen Aid on the granite counter, and a Le Creuset casserole dish on the rear burner. In the corner a mammoth fridge-freezer towers over James. He opens a cupboard door to find a walk-in pantry behind it, stocked with an array of staples, and a note from Stark that just says, ‘Groceries are delivered on tuesdays, tell Friday what you want. Don’t burn the building down and remember the knives are strictly for food.’

James backs out of the pantry and finds the knives. They’re in a block next to the stove; he pulls one out; it glints, and he can tell just by looking at it it’s wickedly sharp. He tosses it in the air, catches it; it’s perfectly balanced. He smiles. He thinks maybe this is what winning feels like.

—

He’s not smiling the next day, when he’s back at Stark’s lab, this time inside, sitting on a bench, while Stark rummages around for whatever equipment he needs for whatever torture he’s planning to inflict on James. It’s fine, James tells himself, Stark’s welcome to piss away his hour however he likes. Except the waiting is making James antsy; if he’s honest, he’d rather they’d just get started.

Finally Stark pulls along a wheeled stool and sits himself down in front of James. “Here we go, Sputnik,” he says. “Arm out.”

James lifts his arm and stretches it out in front of him. Tony takes hold of it, a wicked glint in his eye, and starts bending it in as many different directions as it will go.

This is fine, James tells himself, and takes careful, measured breaths. He can handle this.

“So when you killed my mom and dad,” says Stark, and James’s heart sinks. No, he can’t handle this. “Why did you think you were doing it?”

“I told you,” says James, through gritted teeth. “I don’t remember.”

“Do you remember _anything_?” says Stark.

“Not really.”

“What’s the earliest thing you do remember?”

A swirl of images marches through James’s head. Lying on a gurney, just like this one, strapped down, a man looming over him. A boy, skinny, spitting out a tooth in an alleyway, a murderous expression on his face. An explosion, the night sky on fire, a kid with half his skull missing staring at him with blank eyes. A fleeting glimpse of twirling skirts and red lipstick, accompanied by the song that plays on a loop in his head sometimes, when he’s trying to sleep. A swoop in his belly, a view of sparkling water, the taste of cotton candy and the smell of vomit. Snow, splattered with blood that he knows is his. James doesn’t know anything about these images that appear, unbidden, into his head; he doesn’t even know if they’re real. How would he know which came first?

“Fury,” he says. “I remember shooting Fury.”

“Full range of motion,” says Stark, to the computer. He puts something that looks like a disembodied handgrip in James’s hand. “Hold onto this, hard as you can.” That’s directed at James. “Why did you do it?” So’s that.

James grips the little joystick. “Because they told me too,” he says, and it creaks under his fingers, gives a little whine, and then crumples. “I don’t remember our deal involving an interrogation.”

“Sir,” says the disembodied voice of the computer, “I was unable to get a reading from the handgrip dynamometer.”

“That’s because he broke it,” says Stark. “Just note down his grip strength as ‘strong’.” Stark looks at James. “I’m just trying to get to know you better, Terminator. Steve’s been giving me a hard time.”

James hasn’t talked to Rogers since his outburst in the kitchen. He’s seen him, obviously. Captain America seems to have a perpetually wounded expression on his face, like the sight of James alone is enough to cause him pain. But mostly they’ve been ignoring each other, which suits James fine.

“Rogers needs to mind his own business,” James says.

“Captain Busybody?” says Stark. “Seems unlikely. Especially where you’re concerned. Don’t ask me why.”

James grinds his teeth. Stark’s winding him up; it’s working. But it’s also helping, perversely, keeping James present as Stark waves a wand that beeps and chirps over his arm. James has PTSD, apparently, from trauma he doesn’t even remember, which is, in his view, absurd, but there’s no denying that medical procedures of all kinds tend to set his teeth on edge. James’s doctors usually talk to him as they work, their every action peppered with ‘Just a little pinch, James,’ or ‘I’m just going to listen to your chest, if that’s alright with you’. James can’t imagine Stark doing that, but his incessant needling is somehow doing a much better job of keeping him grounded, stopping him from slipping away.

The wand gives a final chirp. Stark sets it to one side and stands up from his stool. “Sit tight,” he says, and disappears out a door to the left.

The clock on the wall says James is twenty minutes in. He’s just got to do the same again, twice. He takes a deep breath.

Stark returns, holding two mugs. One has the Stark Industries logo on it, and is steaming slightly, and one says ‘Keep Calm and Do Science!’, and isn’t. James eyes them with distaste.

“I’m not drinking any mystery fluids,” says James. “Especially not out of that cup.”

“Keep your hair on, it’s just water,” says Stark. “And I don’t want you to drink it.” He looks down at the ‘Keep Calm’ mug. “It _is_ tacky. It was my secret santa present last year, but whoever it was wasn’t really trying very hard. What does ‘do science’ even mean? I bet it was Clint.” He sets both mugs down next to James.

It does look like just water, but James still isn’t going to drink any of it. He might have agreed to be Stark’s science experiment for the afternoon but that doesn’t mean he’s prepared to surrender all self-preservation.

“I just want to do some sensory tests,” says Stark. “So if you could just close your eyes—”

“Nope,” says James. “Not happening.”

Stark throws his hands in the air. “Look, Robocop,” he says. “If you aren’t going to cooperate—”

“Listen, Richie Rich, I _am_ cooperating! I have been sitting here for a full—” James glances at the clock “—twenty-four minutes, letting you run your greasy paws all over my arm like a john with a real weird fetish, and I have not given into the desire to throttle you even a little bit!”

“Gee, thanks,” mutters Stark.

James breathes heavily. “If you want this arrangement to continue, you’re going to need to let me keep my eyes on you at all times.”

“Okay, fine, understood,” says Stark, sounding exceedingly put-upon. “But how the hell am I supposed to test sensation?”

It’s James’s turn to throw his hands in the air now. “I dunno, Stark, maybe you could try asking the guy who’s had the arm for sixty-five years if he can tell hot from cold?”

Stark grits his teeth. “Alright, can you please describe for me how your arm responds to variations in temperature?”

James smiles. “Yeah, I can feel it,” he says. “But it’s muted. Like I’m wearing a glove or something. What was your plan, stick a finger in each cup and see if I could tell which was which?”

“Something like that,” says Stark. “Can you feel pain?”

James mulls on that one. “Not usually.” He sifts through his limited memories, sure he _has_ felt pain at some point, but unable to remember it. Ah. He swallows. “I think… when they first put it on? It hurt a lot then. But that was because of the way they hooked it up, I think… I don’t think they’d got it quite right.”

Stark’s looking at him with a slightly alarmed expression. James ignores it. “I think also it got crushed one time,” he says. “And _that_ hurt.” A lot, he remembers. “But generally, no.”

“It got crushed?” Stark says. He’s running his hand over the arm again, rapping it lightly with his knuckles. “I’ve seen you use it in the field like a shield,” he says. “It’s bulletproof, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“And that doesn’t hurt?”

“Nah.”

Stark rummages in a drawer. “Must’ve taken quite a bit of force to crush it,” he says.

“Well, yeah,” says James. “I think they used a vice?”

Stark pauses briefly in his rummaging, but clearly can’t think of a response to that. “Ah ha!” he says instead, brandishing a small tin. _Magnetic Poetry Set_ , it says on the lid.

“Another secret santa present?” says James.

“This one I know was Steve,” says Stark. He opens the tin and pulls out a word. He sticks it to James’s shoulder. It immediately falls. 

James looks down at it. The word is ‘turgid’. He grimaces. 

“Yeah, I didn’t think that was actually going to work,” says Stark. “Too strong to just be some kind of iron alloy. But at least now I won’t be lying when I say to Steve I’ve used it.”

“Why do you care so much about what Rogers thinks?” James says. “I know you got daddy issues pal, but Captain America’s approval ain’t gonna fix anything.”

Stark scowls at James. “I don’t have _daddy issues_. I have complicated psychological trauma because I didn’t get along great with my dad and then someone _killed_ him. I’m going to take a sample now.”

“Sounds a lot like daddy issues to me,” James says, concentrating hard on a weird schematic Stark has pinned to the wall. It looks like a... submarine? But also like it can fly. “You’re gonna take a sample from my bullet-proof arm with a scalpel?”

“Don’t worry, C3P0, it’s a special scalpel.” Stark scraps at his arm. “How do you even know the phrase ‘daddy issues’? You spent most of the last century in a fridge, and you don’t even remember it.” He stabs again, harder this time. There’s a minor screech, and then Stark holds up a bent blade.

James shrugs. “Yeah,” he says. “Talk about ‘complicated psychological trauma’, huh?”

Stark looks from his crumbled scalpel to James. “Touché,’ he says.

—

“I think I hurt Captain America’s feelings,” James says.

“Oh?” says Molly.

“I told him not to stop calling me Bucky,” says James. 

“You’re allowed to tell him not to call you Bucky, if that’s not what you want to be called.”

“I… didn’t do it very nicely.”

“Did you _try_ telling him nicely?”

James _had._ He’d said it over and over again. Rogers just didn’t listen. “Yeah,” he says. 

“Do you regret it?”

James thinks about that. “No,” he says. Captain America can deal with it. He’s a big boy now, after all. 

If that’s the wrong answer, Molly doesn’t give any indication. “Do you want to tell me why you’re so opposed to being called Bucky? You don’t mind James, and that...”

“Comes from the same source?”

“If you like.”

“James is different,” says James. “It’s just a name. Not special. Ten on every block. Could be anybody. But there’s only one Bucky I’ve ever heard of.” He pauses, trying to sort out in his head why that’s such a bad thing. “You know he came to visit me that time?” he says. “Not long after I turned myself in?”

“I was made aware of that incident, yes,” says Molly. She sounds faintly disapproving, and James feels a perverse spark of pleasure to think there’s someone who doesn’t think Steve is unimpeachable.

“He turned up and said, hey pal, you’re Bucky Barnes and you’ve known me since you were seven years old,” says James. “And I didn’t even consider arguing. I was just like, yeah, okay. Whatever you say.”

Molly clicks her pen. Down; up; down: not impatient; thoughtful. It’s unnerving, having someone pay such close attention to what James has to say. He’s not used to it. 

“Okay,” Molly says. “So the problem with being Bucky is that it’d be conforming to who Steve Rogers wants you to be?”

James frowns. It sounds juvenile, when she puts it like that, like he’s a teenager who’s mad his mom won’t let him dye his hair. “It’s not about _conforming_ ,” he says. “It’s—” he tugs on his hair, frustrated. “When I was the Winter Soldier, when I was the _asset_ —” he spits the word out like it’s bile “— I knew that was who I was because they told me so. And when Rogers told me I was Bucky Barnes, it was just the same.” He’d accepted it just like he’d accepted everything else he’d been told. Which is to say, pretty dispassionately. The truth of himself had been fairly unimportant, back then. He doesn’t know when it started to matter. 

“Ahh,” says Molly, like she gets it now. “In that case, I think you’re perfectly justified in telling Captain America to stop being such a bloody knobhead.”

“I was a little mean,” says James.

Molly laughs. “Everyone’s mean sometimes,” she says. “It’s just part of being human.”

“I was never mean before,” James says, frowning.

“Before when?” says Molly, and well, she’s got him there.

—

Clint’s hiding in the ceiling above the shooting range. He does that sometimes, it’s not weird.

‘It’s extremely weird,” said Natasha, when he accidentally let it slip to her during their conversation about why, exactly, he’s been trying to befriend the Winter Soldier.

“He’s really good, Nat! Have you seen him?”

“Yes,” she said. “Clint, you can’t save everyone.”

“I’m not trying to save anyone.” He’s not. He doesn’t think he’s in a position to tell anyone how to live their life. “I just wanted to make sure he knew he wasn’t the only one with a ‘past’,” Clint had said, and she’d given him that look she has sometimes, exasperated yet fond, like he’s a small child who thinks he can fly. Sweet but stupid.

She might be right. It remains the only thing he’s said to the Soldier so far, and the expression on James’s face (bafflement, alarm, murder—although Clint’s starting to think the last one is just his default setting) had been enough to send Clint back into the rafters.

It’s hard to tell when James will come in; like all good spies, he avoids a predictable routine. But Clint comes here often enough himself that they cross paths pretty regularly, and sometimes, if Clint’s lucky enough to be forewarned by the recoil of a large, bolt-action rifle reverberating through the floor outside the range, he chooses to approach via the ceiling.

Today, James is in the zone, and it’s truly a beautiful thing to watch. James aims; pulls the trigger; the shot soars towards the target, landing precisely where it’s meant to. James pulls the bolt to reload, takes aim again. It’s hypnotic. 

Then James aims, pauses, lowers his gun, and squints upwards. Clint frowns. James says something. Clint’s turned his hearing aids off, because, well, this is a shooting range, but he doesn’t need them. He can see James’s lips clearly, and they’re saying his name.

Clint almost falls out of the ceiling.

“Barton,” James is saying. “Get down from there before I shoot you.”

Shamefaced, Clint clambers down. “Hey,” he says, fumbling with his hearing aid.

“What do you want, Barton?” Regrettably, Clint can now hear the tone of James’s voice. It’s not good.

“I’m just watching. Hoping to pick up some shooting tips, you know?”

“You want to pick up shooting tips from me?” James doesn’t sound like he’s buying it.

“Yeah,” says Clint. “You know guns aren’t really my weapon of choice, but in the field sometimes I run out of arrows or I lose my bow or something and I have to make do.”

“Right.” James eyes him sceptically, then reaches for the pistol strapped to his thigh. “Go on then,” he says, holding it out to Clint.

Clint stares at it. Whatever he was expecting, it wasn’t that. “What?” he says.

James nods at the target. “Can’t give you tips unless I see you in action.”

“Okay,” says Clint. He reaches for the gun. James doesn’t let go.

“If you miss on purpose, Barton, I’ll know.” he says.

Clint believes him. Shit.

He considers closing his eyes, but he doesn’t quite dare. Instead, he takes aim and hopes for the best. Shots ring out. He lowers the gun. James pushes the button to bring the target forward for inspection. It whirs merrily towards them. Clint feels queasy.

It’s not good. He’d emptied the clip, but where there should be a nice, ideally loose, spread, there’s just one—large!—hole, where his shots have converged in the centre of the target.

James doesn’t say anything, just stares at Clint, waiting.

“Okay,” says Clint. “I lied, a little. I don’t really need help shooting.”

James has his arms crossed, a ‘no shit, Sherlock’ expression on his face. Clint winces. “It’s like…” he says, searching feebly for a suitable explanation, “... like, LeBron doesn’t need basketball tips but I’m sure he still enjoys watching a game.”

“Who?”

“Or like, you can be the best pitcher in the world but you’re still gonna appreciate a great fastball thrown by someone else, you know?” James’s face twitches at this, barely imperceptibly. Clint probably wouldn’t even have noticed if he wasn’t so used to Nat, but he chooses to hope it’s a good sign. “I just like watching you shoot. It’s like art, you know?”

“You think I kill people… artfully?”

“Yes?” says Clint. “I mean that makes it sound a little dark. You aren’t killing anyone in here.”

“No,” says James. “Just practicing.”

“Yeah, so if someone sneaks up on Sam, you can get to them first, like you did last week,” Clint says. James frowns. “What, you think I didn’t notice?”

James shrugs. “If you wanna watch, you can watch,” he says. “But quit hiding.” He turns away, ducking back behind the scope of his rifle.

“Wait,” says Clint, and James pauses with his gun hovering halfway to his eye. “Maybe I don’t need tips exactly,” Clint continues, a little desperately. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t think we couldn’t learn from each other. We could train together sometimes?”

“I’m not looking for friends,” says James.

“Me neither,” says Clint. “Just colleagues improving each other’s form.”

James hesitates, then nods. “Okay,” he says. “Sure.”

“And maybe in the spring we could watch some baseball?” Clint says, taking a punt, pushing his luck.

“That’s not training,” says James.

“Team-building,” says Clint.

“I’ve never watched baseball.” James’s tone is dismissive, but he looks uncertain, like he’s not sure whether it’s true. According to Steve, Bucky Barnes had a pretty mean fastball himself, but Clint’s not stupid enough to point that out.

“You’ll like it,” he says.

James screws up his face, but he doesn’t say no.

—

Pepper invites Steve to the opening night of an art exhibition she’s going to. Somebody told her that Steve ‘likes’ art, or so she says. Steve suspects she feels sorry for him and that she probably agrees with Sam, who keeps telling Steve he needs to get out more.

Steve goes, because it would be rude not to. And because Sam’s probably right, and because he’s tired of spending his evenings staring at his TV screen and not listening to a word. 

He regrets it as soon as he gets there, of course. Before he gets there, really, but even more so on arrival. It’s a horde of well-dressed women with trailing scarves and statement necklaces, clutching glasses of chardonnay and trading cheek-kisses that never seem to land. Steve circles awkwardly, looking at the art and struggling to figure out what to make of it, his own glass of wine warming in his too big hands. He wishes he never took it; he doesn’t like it and it’s doing nothing, of course, to cut through his cloddishness and social unease, and now he’s stuck with it; there’s nowhere to put it down.

The art is... Steve doesn’t know, is the thing.

Steve used to have opinions. Steve used to have _so many_ opinions. He remembers ranting non-stop about the art he liked and didn’t like, about Picasso and Matisse, about Dali and Edward Hopper, about fucking Renoir and his insipid pastels, about the terrible portrait of Mr Wilkinson, the headteacher, in their old school hall, about the cowardice of the decision to remove Diego Rivera’s mural from the Rockefeller Center; all while Bucky chopped vegetables or shined his shoes or sipped his beer and nodded sagely whenever Steve paused to draw breath. Steve used to know exactly what kind of art he thought was good and what kind of art he thought was boring, or pandering, or just goddamn mediocre.

But when he squints at the art in front of him—small, goblin-like statues—he’s got nothing. He’s baffled. It means nothing to him; he honestly can’t tell if it’s good or bad.

He feels lost; he feels seventy years behind. He doesn’t belong here. It’s funny. The old, skinny Steve didn’t fit in with the high art scene either; would never have made it through the front door of a place like this. But that didn’t stop him from having a point of view; he judged them just as harshly as they judged him. Tonight, Steve’s been welcomed with open arms, and he mostly just feels uncomfortable and out of place.

There’s a gentle hand on his shoulder. “Steve, can I introduce you to Clarissa Longborne?” Pepper asks, shooting him a very apologetic look. “She’s a regular donor to the Stark Foundation. Clarissa, this is Steve Rogers.”

Steve smiles tightly.

“Ah, yes,” says the woman. “I heard Captain America used to dabble as an artist, is it true?”

“You could say that,” Steve says. “I used to draw blue comics for forty-five cents a page.”

Clarissa Longborne splutters on her wine. God only knows why he said that. Didn’t want her to think he was the kind of person who ever had the luxury to _dabble_ , he supposes. Nothing useless can ever be truly beautiful: for Steve, useful had always meant ‘contributes to the rent’.

If he’s hoping it will shock Clarissa into silence though, he’s disappointed. “How _kitsch_ ,” she says, once her throat has cleared, and Steve just knows she’s wondering where she can get a genuine Captain America Tijuana bible to display in her front parlour. 

She gestures airly at the sculpture in front them. “So what do you think of modern art, Captain?”

Steve’s been expecting the question, but he doesn’t have an answer ready. He takes a sip of his wine and winces at the acidity. He could say he hates the scuplture, but it’s not true. Hating it would be a relief. He just doesn’t _get_ it. He suspects, too, that hatred is the response she’s expecting from him, and that’s enough to make him reach for something else. “It’s very… evocative,” he says, fumbling for what Bucky used to call his ‘ten-dollar’ words, “of, ah, sadness. And the Brothers Grimm.”

“The Brothers Grimm?” says Pepper.

“In that it looks like something that would live under a bridge,” Steve says.

Clarissa frowns. Pepper cocks her head to one side, considering. “I can see that,” she says.

“Hmmm,” says Clarissa. “Oh look, there’s Penelope Travers. I must ask her about her trip to Florence.” She wanders off, thankfully, leaving Steve alone with Pepper. 

“God, she’s awful,” says Pepper. “I’m sorry Steve, she really wanted to meet you, and I can’t really afford to offend people. What with the rate Tony does it we’d have no donors left.”

“It’s fine,” says Steve. He doesn’t really understand why the Stark Foundation needs donors—isn’t Tony rich enough?—but it’s no business of his.

There’s a pause while they stare at the troll some more, and then Pepper says, “Dirty comics?”

Steve blushes. “Only a handful of times,” he admits. “I wasn’t all that good at them. Generally I did flyers. Soup cans and ladies fashions.”

“Ah,” she says. “Pop art before it was cool.”

Steve’s heard of that. It confuses him, like everything else. “Last time I was paying attention, the cool kids had only just figured out that they didn’t need to make their pictures look like anything at all.”

Pepper laughs. “You know most of the people in this room would kill to experience the New York art scene in 1940.”

“Oh, I’m one of them,” Steve says. “I was just a guy doodling away in Brooklyn. I used to go into Manhattan occasionally and press my face against the glass.”

“Still,” says Pepper, a little wistfully. “To be able to remember when abstraction was a new idea! What did you think of it?”

Steve laughs, in spite of himself. It’s nerdy, and sweet; a striking contrast with the predatory ghoulishness of Ms Longbourne. “Oh I thought it was wonderful. Genius. It seems so obvious now, doesn’t it? But back then it was genuinely shocking. Like discovering a whole new dimension. Art doesn’t just have to be a copy of the real world! Imagine.”

“Did you try it?”

“Not really,” admits Steve. “There wasn’t a heap of money in it then. I couldn’t really afford to throw paint around and see what happened. Now, of course, it seems like it would have been a pretty good investment. I did give cubism a go once. _Only_ once. Bucky said I’d made him look like a monster and he wouldn’t sit for me anymore if I was going to ruin his face like that. I called him a philistine and he said—” Steve smiles, remembering. “He said, ‘pal, if being a philistine means I get to stay in one piece, then I’m happy to be a philistine.” _But he didn’t stay in one piece, did he?_ says the snake in his brain and he falters, as wretchedness floods through him again.

What was the other thing Bucky had said? ‘I’d rather be a Steve Rogers original than a Picasso copy, any day’, he’d said, and then he’d reached out and turned Steve’s scowling face away from the failed picture, so he could steal a kiss. Always so smooth, that was Bucky.

Steve looks out across the gallery. There’s a couple down the other end; two men holding hands. Steve’s still not used to it; it makes his heart race a little whenever he sees it.

 _I know I used to be your boyfriend or whatever_ , James had said, and Steve’s breath had hitched, and he’d caught himself thinking, how do you know that? Steve’s never told a soul, the fact of them being… _whatever._ He’s sure Bucky didn’t. It’s not in any government record, it’s not in the history books.

It’s less shocking now, of course; people talk glibly about desires that used to keep Steve awake at night with fear. So maybe it was just a lucky guess; maybe Steve’s just that transparent, or maybe the Winter Soldier was trained to root out a man’s desires, or maybe… It’s pathetic, but the truth is that even as James was trampling on all Steve’s most dearly-held hopes—even as James was trying his hardest to disabuse Steve of the idea that Bucky is floating around inside his head, just waiting for the right moment to pop out—in the split second between the blows, Steve had thought: _maybe he remembers after all_.

Steve takes a gulp of wine and feels nauseous. “Pepper,” he says. “Thanks for this, but I’m—”

“Go on,” she says, nodding towards the door. “I think the speeches are about to start. Get out while you can.”

Relieved, Steve heads for the exit, scoping out a spot to abandon his wine as he goes. There’s a windowsill with three empty glasses beside a deep blue statue in the corner. He glances back at it as he leaves, and it seems to glower after him, squatter and more misshapen than the rest.

—

“Do you not believe you’re Bucky Barnes or something?” Stark says to James, at his next arm session. So far Stark’s mostly just been staring at the scans from last time and prodding at various plates with a frown.

“I believe it,” James says. “I got no reason to doubt it. Besides, they found a second cousin three times removed or something and ran a DNA test.” They’d had the lab tech talk James through the results; something about how being engaged in the process would help him reclaim ‘ownership of the self’. The guy has been nice, explaining it all to James in simple terms, even though at that point James was struggling to string two words together, and mostly stared blankly in a way which must have been fairly intimidating. “Seems I’m definitely related somehow and the rest of the family’s all accounted for. The guy who took a nosedive out of a train in enemy territory’s unfortunately the most likely candidate.”

“You could be a clone,” Stark says.

“Gee, thanks,” James says. “Now there’s a thought that’s going to keep me up at night. No, it’s not that I don’t think I’m Bucky Barnes, it’s just that me being Bucky Barnes doesn’t mean as much to me as it seems to mean to everybody else.” Rogers is constantly trying to tell James what it means to be Bucky Barnes, but if James is Bucky and Bucky’s him, shouldn’t James be the expert? James sighs. “He doesn’t really seem to have much in common with who I am now.”

Stark considers this. “Well, the accent’s getting pretty thick,” he says.

“What?”

Stark stares at him. “Your accent? You didn’t notice? When I first met you it was non-existent. The definition of neutral. Like if an American accent came in a can. Now I feel like I’ve somehow fallen into an amateur production of Bugsy Malone.”

James doesn’t know what that is, but it doesn’t sound like something he needs to take seriously. “I don’t have an accent,” he says.

“I don’t mean to say it sounds fake,” says Stark. He’s frowning at James’s arm now, like maybe if he looks at it hard enough it will reveal all its secrets. “When I say amateur. It’s just that I would expect more glitz from a professional version, you know? Like you’d have the hat and the waistcoat and maybe spats? Gangster glam, instead of this hobo-chic you’ve got going on. Which, don’t get me wrong, it works, mostly, although you should wash your hair occasionally. But my point is that it’s not that I think the accent sounds fake. I think it sounds incredibly genuine. It’s like an amateur production put on by a Brooklyn middle school, where the kids are also actually marauding assassins.”

James blinks. “I don’t marauder.”

“Isn’t that the point of Bugsy Malone? It’s a show about gangsters where they don’t actually kill anyone?”

“I’m really not sure what I’m supposed to be contributing to this conversation.”

“Maybe you’re right about you and Bucky. He was a real dapper guy by all accounts. I bet the real Bucky Barnes would have worn spats.”

“I don’t have an accent and I don’t marauder and I have _never_ ,” says James, emphatically, “worn spats in my life.”

“Okay,” says Stark, but he’s not really listening. He picks up a small flathead screwdriver and deftly pops open the plating on James’s forearm, revealing a tangle of wires below. “Ah-ha! Now we’re talking.”

—

 _Spats,_ thinks James, furiously. Spats! He never wore spats because wasn’t running gin on the South Side of Chicago in 1926, and also because he had no desire to dress like a penguin. Nobody James’s age wore spats. When James wanted to look nice he wore his blue suit that fitted him perfectly and cost a whole week’s wages, and yes, it was three-piece because he wasn’t an _animal_ , but… how the fuck does he know that?

—

Steve goes to visit Peggy, and this time she doesn’t recognise him at all.

Steve starts to wonder if the past he remembers is anything more that a story he told himself.

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry, friends, for how long this took. I thank you for your patience.

“If you think about it, a super-fast metabolism is a stupid trait for a superhuman to have,” Barton says. “Sure, Steve’s shredded as fuck, but if there was, say, a nuclear apocalypse he’d starve to death in days.”

“Why are you talking?” says James, as he sets up his rifle in front of the open window. He’s thinking about having a smoke. He feels like he’s always thinking about having a smoke these days, constantly picturing how easy it would be to reach into his pocket and pull one out, stick it between his teeth. Cup his hand around to protect it from the wind, light it, inhale, feel the burn travel down into his chest, feel his lungs fill with something that isn’t air. It plays on a loop in his head, over and over, like his brain doesn’t have anything better to do. Eventually, just to shut it up, he’d bought a pack. It hadn’t worked, of course. As soon as he’d finished, it had started up again. The loop still plays, he still feels the itch in his fingers. The only thing that shuts it up is having another. He’s not actually addicted to nicotine, his doctor says, something about his own super metabolism making that impossible. Instead, his therapist posits, he’s compelled by the _ritual_ of smoking. James hopes they’re both wrong: he prefers his urges to have nice, simple explanations like chemical withdrawal.

“I’m just saying. How can he be super when his body is incapable of storing fat? Fat is important to human survival, I’m pretty sure.”

“He’s super because he’s _strong_ ,” says Wilson, rolling his eyes. “And that takes a lot of energy. The speed of his metabolism is a side-effect, not a deliberate feature.”

“What do you think?” says Barton, turning on James. “Your metabolism must be almost as fast as Steve’s; how long do you think you’d survive in a nuclear apocalypse?”

Longer than Captain fucking America, that’s for sure; James is a cockroach. “I _think_ ,” he says, “neither of you know what the fuck you’re talking about.” The centre of his scope is trained on the balcony opposite, waiting for the signal that it’s time for Wilson to swoop out and corner the bad guys. James and Barton are here to provide cover from above, supposedly, but there’s nothing about the set-up to suggest that both of them are really needed. Another make-work scheme for the Winter Soldier. James leans back, thinks _fuck it_ , and pulls out a cigarette.

Wilson, attention caught by the sound of the lighter — which isn’t right, doesn’t sound right, doesn’t feel right in James’s hand — looks scandalised. “You can’t do that in here,” he says.

James looks around the empty office they’ve broken into purely for its view of the building across the street. Rows of desks barely separated by small grey partitions, each with an uncomfortable looking swivel chair and a blank computer screen. James thinks they sell medical equipment. “Why?” he asks, exhaling. “You think they’ll kick us out?”

“Smoking _kills_ ,” says Wilson. 

“Oh no,” James says, tapping ash into a sad-looking peace lily on the desk next to them. There’s a light on the desk’s computer, pulsing gently, like it’s breathing. Someone’s stuck a post-it to the monitor: _If you’re going through hell, keep going_. James grimaces; he’s already lived longer than he ever wanted.

“Kills _me_ , specifically,” says Wilson. “You might have super-lungs, but I don’t. You ever heard of second-hand smoke?”

“Stop being such a priss, Wilson, Christ.”

“Stop being such a white-guy stereotype,” says Wilson. “The whole smoking-and-brooding-and-looking-tortured bad boy aesthetic peaked in the eighties.”

“I don’t know that it did,” says Barton. “I think it’s still a thing. I mean, it’s working for him.” 

“Thanks, Barton.”

“Also to be fair he literally was tortured,” Barton adds. “A lot. He was tortured _a lot_ , Sam.”

Wilson looks a little guilty, but not really. “I think he’s concerned about inhibiting my recovery if he lets that affect how he talks to me,” James says. Wilson looks startled, which tells James that he’s right, and also that Wilson hadn’t expected him to pick up on it.

“Is that a thing?” says Barton, frowning. “Whenever I’m in potential torture situations I always distract myself by thinking about how nice everyone will have to be to me after.”

“Don’t worry, Barton, next time you get tortured I’ll take you to a ball game.” James stubs out his cigarette in the plant pot. “It’s time. Cap’s on the move.”

Wilson crouches on the windowsill, wings unfurling. “Don’t start a fire,” he says, and then he jumps.

A few seconds later, Rogers’ shield comes hurtling across the street and embeds itself in the office wall behind James and Barton, knocking over the peace lily as it goes.

James sighs. He tugs the shield out of the wall and throws it back. Then he lights another cigarette.

—

James has just settled into his post-mission bath — a glass of whiskey in one hand, book in the other, and a pack of smokes in the soap dish — when there’s a knock on his door. 

James puts his book down, but he doesn’t get out of the bath. He doesn’t _want_ to get out. Rogers has mostly left him alone, these last couple of weeks, and while James knows it can’t last for ever, he’s not ready for it to end. He doesn’t want to hear what Rogers has to say about the mission, to smile politely while Rogers rhapsodises about James’s various minor contributions. _Say, Buck, if you hadn’t been there we’d never have defeated those robot gorillas! That was some shot you made at the one heading for the detonator._ He stares at the bathroom wall, considering whether, maybe just this once, he can ignore it, when there’s a second knock.

Fuck it, he thinks, and picks the book back up. Rogers’ feelings are not his problem.

But whoever’s on the other side of the door doesn’t go away; instead, they open the goddamn door.

James stiffens. He can tell it isn’t Rogers. Too quiet. In fact, James can’t identify them from the sound of their walk, which makes him pretty sure he knows exactly who it is.

Sure enough, moments later Romanov’s head appears around James’s bathroom door.

“Hello,” she says, casting an appraising eye over him. There are bubbles in the bath — James likes bubbles — but not _movie star_ bubbles. They’re not enough to protect James’s modesty, if he had any. Most of them are down by his feet, where the taps are. But James doesn’t have any modesty, and besides, he doesn’t think it’s sexual, the Widow’s glance. He’s seen her flirt; with marks, to get information; with Steve, to make him blush. She’s never bothered with James, probably because she’s too good at what she does to think it would work. No, it’s a different kind of appraisal, one which takes in the bubbles, the book, and the half-empty fifth of whiskey on the floor by the bath, and quietly adds it all to what she understands of James.

“Romanov,” James says, coldly. He doesn’t put down the book. He wonders what he’d have to offer Tony to get a lock on his door that works.

Somehow she interprets that as an invitation to come in, hopping gracefully up onto the vanity and swinging her legs idly against the drawers. “Let’s talk about Steve.”

That gets James’s attention. He looks up. “Why?” he says, tersely.

“How are you feeling about him?”

“He’s one of the most frustrating people I’ve ever met,” says James. “And I’ve _killed_ most of the people I’ve met.”

“Sexually frustrating?”

James stills. “Get out, Romanov.”

“Make me,” she says.

James looks at her, and she smiles back. It’s not that he can’t — they both know he _can_ , but it would take a lot more energy than James is willing to expend right now, and she knows it. James doesn’t want to get out of the goddamn bath; he certainly doesn’t want to risk destroying it completely by starting a fight with Natasha fucking Romanov.

“Hate and love are very close emotions, is all,” she says. “Or so they say.”

“Who says?”

She shrugs. “Tale as old as time — Much Ado About Nothing, Elizabeth and Mr Darcy, that guy and that girl from the show about the rhinos…”

“Are you suggesting I have sex with Rogers?” James asks, ignoring the sudden, momentary flare of… something, somewhere behind his navel.

“No,” says Romanov. Her legs stop swinging. “That is exactly what I am here to tell you not to do. You get into his pants with anything less than a lifetime guarantee and I will personally cut your balls off.”

James raises his eyebrows at this. He looks down at the water, where his balls are nestled comfortably between his thighs. He’s only just starting to get to know them. “Why do you care?” he says.

There’s a slight pause. “The paperwork, mostly,” Romanov says, affecting an air of boredom. “Whenever he gets upset he jumps on ten times as many grenades as usual and won’t stop throwing himself off buildings and then _I_ have to file a bunch of reports explaining why he’s ended up in medical again.”

James takes a mouthful of whiskey and and leans back, resting the glass in his hand on the side of the tub. “That sounds a heck of a lot like your problem,” he says.

“That’s not very gallant,” says Romanov. “I thought guys your age were all about helping the damsel in distress.”

James snorts. “Why do you care?” he asks, again.

Romanov’s hands grip the countertop. “He’d let you break his heart,” she says, after a pause. “Wouldn’t do a thing to stop it, if he thought it was what you wanted. So you gotta not, okay?”

Ah. So this is what it’s about. God forbid Captain America get hurt. “I wasn’t planning on it,” James says.

Romanov stares at him carefully, but looks satisfied with what she sees. “Good,” she says, and leaves. 

The water’s cold. James sighs and pulls the plug.

—

James remembers when everyone was afraid of him. It wasn’t that long ago, although it’s hard to believe it now, what with how Romanov seems to think she's got the measure of him, and the way Barton grins at him like they’re old buddies and even Stark looks pleased to see him half the time, even if that _is_ simply because James has allowed him unfettered access to his arm. But when he was first brought in — once anyone had dared talk to him at all — they'd only interview him in twos and threes, with an armed guard standing by the door. Fury and Hill, the Army top brass, head honchos at the CIA and FBI, the whole alphabet soup, even the ones that don’t officially exist, every one of them watching him nervously through mirrored glass like all their nightmares had come home to roost.

Molly was the only one brave enough to talk to him alone, the only one brave (or stupid) enough to shoo the armed guard into the hallway. “If you wanted to hurt me, would Private Reynolds be able to stop you?” she’d asked, in response to the Soldier’s slightly raised eyebrows. 

“No.”

“Well then,” she said. “I don’t enjoy having a man with a gun looming over me while I do my job, and I don’t imagine he enjoys doing the looming. Or maybe he does, maybe that’s exactly why he signed up. What do you think? I imagine you have looming experience, do you enjoy it?”

The Soldier stared at her. He didn’t recall ever enjoying anything. “No,” he said. 

Molly nodded understandably. “Bit dull.”

The Soldier didn’t know what to say to this, so he didn’t say anything.

“I take it you'd not into the chitchat,” Molly says. “Prefer to just crack on.”

The Soldier stared some more, and then warily nodded his head.

“Okay, James,” said Molly. “Why didn't you kill Captain America?”

The Soldier scowled. A trap. He should have seen it coming. “I don't know.”

“Did you want to kill him?” 

“That was my mission.”

“Okay,” says Molly. “So you didn’t necessarily want to kill him.”

“Listen, lady,” said the Soldier. “The last guys who had me weren’t quite so interested in my hopes and dreams as you lot seem to be. What I _wanted_ didn’t matter. He was my mission and I failed, and now I’m here with you.”

Molly stared at him. The Soldier stared back. He didn’t know where it had come from; he didn’t talk like that. He didn’t _talk_ , not really. He said ‘yes’ and ‘no’ and ‘I don’t know’, and he gave mission reports. But some dark, unfamiliar corner of his brain, one normally kept behind a door locked tight, seemed to have taken over.

“Well, then,” said Molly, and the Soldier was alarmed to see she was smiling. “I’ll take that as a no. How’s the book?” 

The Soldier frowned, confused by the change of subject, but decided not to concern himself with Molly’s lack of discipline. “Harry Potter is an idiot,” he said. “He should stay out of trouble and let people who know what they’re doing handle things.”

“Ye-es,” said Molly. “But then they wouldn’t nearly as interesting books to read.”

“Those kids are getting a very poor education,” said the Soldier. “Sure, they know all those magic tricks, but can they even count? And flying around on a broomstick doesn’t sound like very good exercise.”

“Were you an athletic teenager, James?” said Molly.

The Soldier considered this. That museum had said he was, but how would they know? “I was never a teenager,” he decided. All those emotions; it just didn’t sound like him.

—

Exercise is good for emotions, or so Molly is always telling James, so maybe if Harry Potter had tried running around that Quidditch pitch instead of flying over it, he wouldn’t feel the need to keep yelling at people who were only trying to help.

As for James’s own emotions, well, there’s still little sign of the ones he’s pretty sure he’s supposed to have: guilt and gratitude and some kind of desire to remember. But he’ll cop to feeling frustrated, and tired, and bored, and he’ll admit that an hour or two in the gym seems to help, or at least settle him enough so he can get some goddamn sleep. And then there’s the buzzing sensation, the feeling like a colony of bees has taken up residence under his skin and is threatening to tear him apart, that comes before an — _outburst_ , a Potter-esque loss of control. James doesn’t know the name for that emotion, but he knows he doesn’t like it, knows he’d do just about anything to keep it under wraps.

That said, he’d rather _not_ use Stark’s gym; he’d much rather use a normal, public gym. But he tried that once, and it turns out he can’t blend into a crowd and still push himself the way he needs to. Only Stark’s gym has treadmills that go fast enough to make his breath come quick, to make sweat bead at his temples, to mean he can get to that place where he can’t think about anything more than putting one foot in front of the other. Only Stark’s gym has weights heavy enough to make his muscles burn and his legs shake with exertion, to leave him with that satisfying ache of a body that’s done a decent day’s work. But he doesn’t want to work out with the rest of the emotionally-stunted super-squad (Wilson’s words, not James’s, although he’s pretty sure Wilson didn’t think anyone could hear it when he said it), so he waits until the rest of the compound is asleep.

Only, tonight, the rest of the compound _isn’t_ asleep. James has just gotten started when the door to the gym opens and someone else comes in. Someone giant and blond and, sadly, it’s not fucking Thor. Captain America is in James’s gym, in James’s carefully orchestrated solitude. James grits his teeth and ups the speed on his treadmill.

Rogers is clearly surprised to see James; there’s an uncomfortable pause where it looks like he’s considering leaving (please, thinks James), but instead he gives James a tight smile and heads for the treadmill furthest away. There’s only, unfortunately, seven or eight yards in it, but it’s fine. James is going to ignore Rogers and just think about putting one foot in front of the other.

Easier said than done, of course. Rogers is unzipping his hoodie now, shucking it to the side, and why is he incapable of buying shirts that fit him? James has a _metal arm_ and somehow he manages. Why is he _here_ , instead of outside, on one of his pally runs with Wilson?

Shut up, thinks James, and he takes a deep breath and stares into the middle distance. One foot in front of the other, again and again and again. Thup, thup, thup.

Tthup, tthup, tthup. James jerks his head to the side. Rogers has started running, and somehow he’s fallen into near-perfect step with James. Unwittingly, it seems — he doesn’t seem to have even noticed.

For fuck’s sake.

Ignore it, ignore it, ignore it. James ups his speed again and pushes on, trying his best to pretend he’s still alone. Except every time James goes faster, Rogers follows. It’s like being chased. James gets enough of that at work; he doesn’t need it in his home life as well.

He looks across at Rogers. Rogers’s cheeks are faintly pink, and he’s got a faint sheen of sweat. Not in a gross way, like James, who’s dripping with it. Just a nice, healthy glow. And a serene expression on his face, like he doesn’t notice the tension that’s crackling through the room.

James slams the stop button so hard it cracks. Fuck this. This is not what he signed up for. No where in the masses of documents he’d had to sign before he could become a legal person again did it say anything about having to deal with smugly glowing super soldiers while he was trying to get in his daily 50k. Glowing with radioactivity, maybe, but glowing with the joy of exercise? Nope.

The noise causes Steve to turn and look at him, frowning slightly. “Everything okay?”

“Just dandy,” James snarls. He grabs his water bottle and gets the hell out of there.

Molly’s full of it. Exercise doesn’t do jack shit.

—

James has been having these dreams, is the problem. They seem to trigger certain… _stirrings_ … in parts of James’s anatomy that have, so far, been largely dormant. And in the dreams, Rogers always seems to have a starring role.

“What would you say if I told you I was queer?” James asks Molly. He feels like it might be something he’s not supposed to tell people, but then the other day he’d seen too guys kissing in the middle of the street, and nobody else seemed bothered. Besides, if they didn’t have him committed for killing all those people, they’re not gonna do it because the thought of Captain America in his tighty-whiteys has started to get him a little hot under the collar.

Molly looks at him. “I’d say… how does that make you feel, James?”

James snorts. “That’s what you always say.”

“Consistency’s important in my line of work,” says Molly. “Some of my patients — not _you_ , you understand, just the really fucked-up ones — aren’t great with surprises.”

James huffs another laugh. Molly considers him. “So,” she says, after a moment. “How does it make you feel?”

James screws up his face. “Honestly? Fuckin’ randy.”

This time it’s Molly’s turn to laugh. “There are worse ways to feel,” she says.

“Hmm,” says James. He thinks of Romanov’s smug grin. “I don’t see a queue of guys lining up to fuck the Winter Soldier.” 

“Maybe not,” says Molly. “James though; he’s a perfectly nice, good-looking guy.”

“I suppose.” A perfectly nice, good-looking guy with a _metal_ fucking _arm_ , but sure.

“Hold that thought,” says Molly, putting her notebook down. “I better get you some pamphlets.”

“Pamphlets?” says James, alarmed. “You don’t— I’m pretty sure I’ve done it before.” He thinks so, at least. He couldn’t say when or with whom, but he knows it’s not the mechanics that confuse him.

Molly looks up from where she’s now rummaging through the stacks of leaflets on the coffee table in the corner. “Let’s just make sure you have the right information to hand to make safe decisions, shall we?” 

“Oh,” said James. “Look, I don’t think I can even get VD, it’s fine.” His cheeks feel like they’re on fire; mortified. It’s unfamiliar. He doesn’t remember ever feeling embarrassed as the Winter Soldier.

“Safe mentally and physically,” hums Molly. James thinks she’s enjoying this. “Is it just men making you feel, uh... randy? It’s not always an either/or situation.”

“Um,” says James. He’s not sure, now she mentions it. The most obvious stirrings have all been prompted by the same annoying, definitely masculine presence, but if he thinks about it there have been some other… flickers. Just yesterday he and Romanov had been out in Brooklyn again, and he’d found his eyes unintentionally drifting from their mark, towards the legs of a pretty girl walking along the boardwalk. She’d had an inch and a half of bare thigh between the hem of her skirt and the tops of her stockings and James had had to pull his eyes away from the sliver of smooth, dark skin; stop himself from staring like a creep.

“That’s okay,” says Molly. “That can be something to think about.” She tips a stack of pamphlets into his lap. _Sexuality: it’s a spectrum!_ says the top one. Underneath is _So you think you might be gay?_ , along with _HIV: Myths & Facts_, and, possibly most mortifyingly: _Are you ready? How to tell if it’s the right time for your first time_.

“Great,” said James. “More homework.”

Molly smiles. “And how does that make you _feel_ , James?”

—

Rogers is in the gym. Again.

To be fair, James has started going earlier than usual, his regular sessions with Stark leaving him desperate to blow off some steam. But it’s still late, late enough that Captain Probably-Irons-His-Underwear should be tucked up in bed, late enough that James should be safe, and yet. When he opens the door Rogers is there, pink and sweaty, and James has the insane thought that he’d like to lick the sweat from Steve’s collarbone, before he abruptly slams it shut again.

He paces outside. This is stupid, he thinks. I’m not _afraid_ of Captain America, he thinks.

He opens the gym door.

Rogers’ head immediately turns towards him. His cheeks are flushed, his blue eyes are bright and worried-looking. James steels himself. “Evening,” he says, with a cursory nod, and pushes on to the mats at the back of the room. There’s this kettlebell thing he’s seen a girl on instagram do that he wants to try out.

Rogers goes back to running. James picks out the heaviest kettlebell (let’s just say there are small cars that weigh less) and starts his first set. Steve’s running fast, James notes. Faster than last time. Maybe, he hopes, that means Rogers is going for a sprint rather than a marathon. HIIT or whatever. 

The instagram girl knows what she’s about — it’s hard work, and James manages to ignore Rogers, at least to start with. But after his fourth set, James can’t help but notice that Rogers hasn’t slowed down any. James likes to push himself as much as the next guy, but there’s a limit to what he’s willing to do recreationally, when nobody’s life (or death) depends on it. 

James sets the kettlebell back on the rack and saunters over to the treadmills. He opens his mouth and then stops, dead in his tracks, and shuts it again, trapping the _you okay there, Stevie?_ that had been about to slip out. _Stevie_. How absurd.

Unfortunately, Rogers is staring at him now; James is only a few feet away, violating the hitherto carefully maintained buffer of space between them. Briefly, James considers scuttling back to his kettlebell, but he knows the only way to get out of this with his dignity intact is to brazen it out.

_Since when do you care about dignity?_ says a snide voice in his head, but James ignores it. “Rogers,” he says. His voice comes out gruffer than he intended. “What are you doing?”

“Running?” says Rogers. His pace falters for a moment, but then he puts his head down and quickly picks it up again.

James steps closer; peers over to read the treadmill’s display. It’s as he thought. Rogers has been running for an hour, with an average speed that would make Usain Bolt look like someone’s grandmother. “Is this one of Stark’s experiments? He challenge you to see if you could break the sound barrier?”

“No,” Rogers huffs.

“Okay. Sure. What are you doing here anyway? Don’t you and Wilson normally run outside?

Rogers looks up at him, frowning. Finally, he pauses his treadmill. “It’s almost midnight,” he says, as he comes to a stop. “In December. It’s twenty-eight degrees outside.”

Oh. James hadn’t thought about that. He’s been avoiding leaving the building after dark lately; he doesn’t do below freezing, himself. Ideally he’d like to say he doesn’t do below fifty, but unless he can convince Stark to move the Avengers Compound to Southern California, he’s shit out of luck on that score. It’s another thing he knows about himself: doesn’t like the cold.

Rogers had been on ice even longer than James, supposedly. Maybe he feels the same.

“Right,” says James. “That’s… that’s, yeah, that’s fair.”

Rogers looks surprised, like he wasn’t expecting James to be so conciliatory. James can feel his cheeks heating up, but he’s not sure why. The kettlebell work-out, he supposes, although he was only just getting started. “Why didn’t you just run during the day?” he says.

“I had a mission,” says Rogers. “I got back late.”

James stares. “You got back from a mission and came to the gym?” James can’t imagine anything worse. That’s the whole point of missions, as far as James is concerned. They tired you out enough that you don’t have to come here and run about like a hamster on a wheel. That, and James has yet to discover any other marketable skills hidden in the labyrinth that is his brain.

James’s own post-mission ritual is all about feeling less like an asset and more like a human being. He fills the tub up with hot water, hot as he can stand, pours himself a drink — whiskey, usually, but sometimes vodka; the liquor doesn’t actually do anything, of course, but it feels important all the same — and lies in there and soaks until he’s all wrinkled and pruney and the heat reaches right to the core of him, until he feels molten inside and as far from frozen as it’s possible to be.

Rogers looks faintly embarrassed. “I couldn’t sleep.”

Oh. Well, James could understand that. Solitude is not the only reason that James’s usual gym time is 3am.

“Not that it’s any of your business,” Rogers adds.

James starts. Rogers is right; what is James even doing here, weirdly interrogating someone he’s made it clear he has no interest in getting to know?“Sorry,” James says. “You’re right. It’s not.”

He turns away. No doubt Bucky Barnes would be able to help Rogers with whatever he’s going through, but James isn’t Bucky Barnes, so he should just leave Rogers alone. He slinks out of the gym.

—

Stark opens the door to the lab and says, “I need a coffee, do you want a coffee?” before James can say anything.

James blinks. “To drink?” he says, following Stark through the door.

Stark looks at James, expression harried. “Yes, to drink. Of course, to drink.” He frowns. “Is that a _braid_ in your hair?” he asks. 

James reaches up to touch the side of his head, where a small plait runs from his temple to his topknot. “Yes?” he says. He’d been inspired by a guy he’d seen on tv with something similar and decided to try out. His hands had seemed to know what they were doing. They’d done it before, he’d concluded. Not on him, but on someone smaller with hair very like his, long and dark with the slightest of waves. “Something wrong with it?”

James has catalogued the many differences between himself and Bucky Barnes; his hair is one of them. That day in the museum, the first time he’d seen a picture of the man he was supposed to be, he’d noticed it straight away. But when the list of discrepancies included ‘no metal arm’, ‘the ability to smile’, and ‘looks at Captain America like he’s the sun’, his hair hardly seemed remarkable.

But what was it Stark had said last time? _He was a real dapper guy._ It’s true that occasionally, images of Bucky’s perfect coif had flitted into James’ mind — usually whenever his own obstructed his vision in battle — but it’s only recently that he’s realised that he could simply cut it, that he too could have Bucky Barnes hair if he wanted. Unfortunately, this flourishing sense of bodily autonomy is not the only character development he’s been subject to; it’s been paired with the growth of a perverse obstinacy, and so James refuses, resolutely, to cut his hair.

Also he’s discovered elastic hair ties, which he estimates increase his efficiency in battle by as much as fifteen percent.

“Not at all,” says Stark. “I should have known that a man who could kill me with his eyes closed wouldn’t be bound by gender stereotypes.”

“Ha,” says James. “Funny.”

Stark bustles off to make the coffee, and James takes a deep breath and settles himself on the workbench. 

Stark reappears with coffee. This time he hands James a mug that says ‘Slytherins have more fun’. James rolls his eyes.

“Not a Harry Potter fan?” Stark asks.

“Not really.”

“Magic is stupid,” Stark agrees. “Why would anyone want to go to a school where computers don’t work? Why would you want a bunch of hocus pocus when you can have science?”

James almost laughs. It’s disconcerting.

“Nat says you’re joining the team secret santa this year,” Stark says, tapping away at his computer, retrieving last week’s notes.

“Does she?” James grimaces. He’d deliberately not attended the name-drawing ‘ceremony’, only to come home and find an ominous scrunch of paper on his shiny kitchen counter. He’s discovered it pays to pick his battles with Romanov, and he’s yet to decide if this is one worth fighting.

“Yes,” says Stark. “You can’t back out now, your name has been assigned to someone. It’ll ruin the whole system.”

“You told me all of the presents you got were shit.”

“That’s not the point!” Stark turns to face him with a dramatic flourish, and James ducks to avoid a face full of coffee. “Secret santa presents are always shit. But the only thing worse than the present you get is the present you don’t get, ya know?”

“No?”

“No one wants to be the sad sack that doesn’t get anything. Besides, if I have to devote valuable time to thinking about what Clint fucking Barton wants for Christmas, then you can spend a moment on whoever you’ve got.” Stark eyes him searchingly. “Who _have_ you got?”

“I thought it was supposed to be a secret.” James has looked at the scrap of paper, but he’s not ready to acknowledge what he saw.

Stark sighs. “I probably wouldn’t believe you if you did tell. Every year I try and figure out who’s got me so I can drop them some useful tips, and every year Romanov runs a misinformation campaign and stymies me.” He frowns. “Actually, you’d be excellent at counter-insurgency. What do you say, want to join forces?”

James blinks. Did Stark just ask for his help? Did Stark just suggest an _alliance?_ Over _Secret Santa?_ “Nah,” he says. “I think I’ll stay out of it.”

Whether he means the whole enterprise or just Stark and Romanov’s games, he’s not sure.

—

Steve’s doing fine, thank you very much. It’s a little cold out, but the cold isn’t the threat it used to be: it can’t kill him _now_ , he knows that better than anyone. Pneumonia-free since ’43, Arctic-tested. ’39, actually, but that doesn’t rhyme, and Pneumonia-free since ’43 is true too. The point is, there’s absolutely no reason he should be bothered by a spot of icy weather — or at least no more so than anybody else.

And, okay, maybe Christmas has never quite felt the same since his mother died, and maybe it’s worse now, in the twenty-first century, where they’ve turned what used to be just a little light in the darkness into an obscene exercise in competitive consumption. But he’ll _survive_ , just like he has the last fourteen Christmases he’s had without a mother.

Last year he’d joined Sam’s family Christmas, and that had been fine. They’d gone to church first thing in the morning, and Sam’s mother had worn a hat, and while Steve couldn’t say he felt at home, exactly, at a Baptist church in Harlem, something about it was reassuring. Steve and his ma had never been particularly avid church goers, not like the Barneses, but they’d always gone to midnight mass. A part of the ritual. Dinner, too, had been nice. It reminded him mostly of the Barnes Christmas dinners, the ones Steve had been invited to— _after,_ post-Ma. The same bustling cheer, the same way that despite the bickering (Sam’s niece and nephew squabbling over the remote, Bucky rolling his eyes at his everything his father said, Winnie shrieking that Becca was going to ruin the gravy if she didn’t pay closer attention), a deep, unquestioned sense of belonging radiated from everyone. Everyone but him, of course.

This year, though, Steve will be alone in the compound with James, who hates him. Everyone else has plans — Tony and Pepper are heading to a log cabin somewhere snowy, just the two of them. Clint’s on his farm, Bruce is on a meditation retreat, Nat’s going on vacation. A beach somewhere, she says, in a tone that strongly discourages further inquiry. Sam will be in Harlem, of course. He invited Steve again, but Steve _can’t_ leave James alone for Christmas, even if James’d probably prefer it.

At least he’s got a roof over his head, Steve tells himself. At least it’s warm, and dry. But he’s given himself the same pep-talk too many times, now, and it’s starting to sound a little stale even for him. Deep down he knows that if he could swap this for Christmas 1944, he’d do it in a heartbeat.

It had been fucking freezing, and they’d been too far behind enemy lines to get their Christmas rations, and the others, who had families to miss, were all in foul moods of various degrees. When Steve woke up on Christmas morning, he saw Bucky, huddled on the other side of the tent rereading his letters from Becca with a maudlin expression. But when Bucky saw Steve was awake he’d smiled and said, Merry Christmas, fucker, and Steve had said, I’m not sure that’s how you’re supposed to talk to your superior officer, and Bucky said, Well I can think of a few other things I’m not supposed to do to my superior officer and then he’d kissed him, and even at the time Steve knew it was selfish but he couldn’t help but be glad they were there and not anywhere else, not even the Barnes’s cosy apartment. Of course, barely more than a month later Bucky was dead, and Steve had to reckon with the realities of leading your friend into a deadly war zone.

_Not dead_. Maybe 1944 was better, but this year James is alive, and he’s safe, and so even if he says nothing to Steve all day then it’s still going to be the best Christmas Steve has had since. Steve is fine. Steve, is, in fact, _happy_.

—

James is abruptly woken on Christmas morning by the fire alarm blaring.

“Whyyyy?” he moans. It’s not even light yet. He rolls over and puts his pillow over his head.

He wasn’t expecting an answer, but of course Stark’s creepy computer is keeping watch. “Smoke detected in the main kitchen, Sergeant Barnes,” it says. “Might I suggest you evacuate the building?”

“Go outside?” says James. The alarm is still going. It’s very loud. The pillow is doing a piss-poor job of blocking it out. He gives in and reluctantly sits up. Peering out the window, he can see a layer of frost glittering on the lawn. He sure as fuck isn’t going out there. “How much smoke are we talking about?”

—

Steve’s not sure how everything went so wrong so quickly. He’d only been trying to get a jumpstart on the food. He had this theory that if he got everything ready to go, then he could present the concept of a Christmas dinner as a fait accompli, and James would eat it, because, well, it was there and ready to eat. Steve wouldn’t _pressure_ him, he’d just — _casually_ — say something like, ‘oh I cooked, do you want some?’, and James would probably accept, because nobody turns down roast beef when it’s going begging, right? He’d considered a turkey; there’d been a fat row of them in the store, each one big enough to feed a hearty family of twelve (or two super-soldiers) easy, but they’d had turkey at Thanksgiving, all the trimmings, ordered by Pepper from a professional chef, and besides, Steve’d never had turkey for Christmas as a kid and neither had Bucky. So, roast beef, and maybe if he follows Gordon Ramsey’s instructions to the letter, he’ll manage to turn out something even Winnie Barnes’ son wouldn’t sneer at. 

Except: _there’s a flaw in that plan, Stevie_ , says the voice in Steve’s head, the one that always sounds like Bucky, and it’s right. Because Steve has never been able to cook, and it turns out it will take more than an online recipe and all the culinary gadgets of the twenty-first century to fix that.

“What on god’s green earth have you done, Steve?”

Steve looks away from where he’s gormlessly watching his dinner go up in smoke, fire extinguisher in hand. He hasn’t quite been able to bring himself to turn it on. Behind him stands James, wearing a comforter wrapped around him like a cape, and an exceedingly peeved expression.

He strides towards Steve, letting go of the comforter in order to tug the extinguisher out of Steve’s hands. “No,” he says. Instead, he quickly turns off the gas (why didn’t Steve think to do that?) and, using his metal hand, sticks a heavy pot lid on top of the pan, trapping the flames inside. The fire disappears, leaving only a thick haze of smoke. James reaches up and turns on the extractor fan, and then turns around to stare at Steve with a pointed look.

Steve stares back. The alarm is still blaring, the extractor fan is whirring. James isn’t wearing a shirt, just a pair of low-slung sweatpants, and Steve can see clearly the pale skin of his abdomen, the mass of scars that make up his left shoulder, the tiny mole that had always sat just below Bucky’s collarbone. It’s a lot to process. Steve opens his mouth. “Thanks. Things, ah, got away from me there,” he says.

“It’s all under control, Friday,” says James, without taking his eyes off Steve. “Turn that off, will ya?”

The alarm stops, to Steve’s immense relief. “I’m still detecting smoke, Sergeant Barnes,” says Friday.

“That was just me,” Steve says. “I’m sorry. But Sergeant Barnes has put the fire out, it’s all fine.” Steve doesn’t know why he does that, parrots the computer’s ‘Sergeant Barnes’ like it’s 1944 and he’s trying to sound professional in front of men from a different unit. “No need to bother Tony, okay? And if you could boost the ventilation that’d be great.”

“Very well, Captain.”

“Got _away_ on you? What exactly were you trying to do here?” James says, his arms crossed in front of him. 

“I was gonna have a go at cooking us Christmas dinner,” says Steve. 

“It’s seven o’clock in the goddamn morning.”

“The butcher said to cook it long and slow!”

“He meant an hour, maybe, not twelve.” James cautiously lifts the lid off the pan. Steve’s beef is still smouldering gently, covered in a black crust of charcoal. “Can you explain why, if ‘long and slow’ was the plan, you decided to flambé it?”

“I was sealing it. Gordon Ramsey says—”

James spears the meat with a knife and lifts it out of the pan. A trickle of dirty oil runs down the side of his arm. “Does Gordon Ramsey say to DEEP FRY IT?” 

The expression on James’s face is thunderous. Steve opens his mouth to reply, but he’s interrupted by the soft ping that usually indicates Friday’s about to communicate.

“Everything’s fine, Friday,” James says, his eyes still boring into Steve, four pounds of burnt sirloin still hovering in the air between them, dripping grease onto the kitchen floor. Steve’s not so sure everything _is_ fine, actually.

“Smoke levels are steadily abating, Sergeant Barnes,” agrees Friday. “But Agent Hill is requesting a video conference.”

James drops the meat back in the pan with a look of disgust. “Figures,” he says. “You better take it in the briefing room, I doubt she’s just calling to wish us happy holidays.”

“What are you gonna do?” says Steve, dumbly.

“Get dressed,” James says, the ‘duh’, heavily implied, picking up his comforter off the floor and wrapping it around himself once more. “I’ll catch you up.”

Reluctantly, Steve goes.

—

James takes a deep, fortifying breath, and then opens the door to the briefing room.

“But it’s Christmas,” Rogers is saying, like a petulant child.

“Tell me about it,” says Hill, from the giant screen on the wall. She’s wearing red lipstick, a lopsided green paper hat, and a frown. “But I’d like us all to make it to the new year, so I’d appreciate it if you and Barnes could go check it out.”

“What’s the problem?” says James, dropping into the seat next to Rogers.

“Merry Christmas, Barnes,” says Hill. “Mystery signal coming from an abandoned Hydra site out in Arizona. Or at least, we thought it was abandoned. Need you to do a sweep, make sure it’s nothing serious.”

“What are Rogers and I gonna do with a mystery signal?” says James. “Radar’s still new for him, I imagine.” He ignores the scowl this elicits on his right. He’s too busy trying to decide how he feels about this development. On the one hand, he has no desire to get geared up and head out into the cold to shoot at shadows. On the other, Christmas alone with Steve Rogers is already proving to be more than James can handle. The look on Rogers’s face as his no doubt careful preparations went up in flames, his casual reference to ‘dinner for us’ — it feels like one of Barton’s _would you rather_ s: a trip to a Hydra base in middle of the fucking desert, or an intimate Christmas dinner with Captain America?

“Stark’s going to meet you there,” says Hill, and doesn’t _that_ fucking clinch it. Stark, and probably fucking C-Rations for dinner. If nobody kills them first.


	4. Chapter 4

It’s not until they’re both on the jet that Steve realises he’s never been on a mission alone with James. He’s barely been alone with James at all, apart from a few awkward encounters in the compound gym. James has always actively avoided it. Now, though, they’re definitely alone. He can feel James’s eyes boring into him as he sets the controls for Arizona.

“You sure you know what you’re doing there?” James asks.

“Yes,” says Steve. He pushes what he thought was the ignition (is it called the ignition, on a jet? What else would it be called?), only to be rewarded with an obnoxious beep. “I did a training module.” Usually someone else flies, it’s true. But it’s not because he _can’t_. It’s just that Natasha or Tony usually does it. Or Sam. Sam was in the Air Force, it only makes sense to let him fly the plane.

“Hmmm.”

Steve glances over his shoulder and sees James looking back at him with a dubious expression. For a second, Steve thinks he’s about to bring up the time Steve crashed the jeep, _again_ , but of course James doesn’t remember that. “Do you want to do it?” Steve asks, keeping his tone neutral and light.

“I just want to get there in one piece, Cap,” says James.

James has only recently started calling Steve ‘Cap’, and somehow he always manages to make it sound mocking. Steve pushes another button and gets another beep, this one shriller then the first. “Fine,” he says, struggling to disentangle himself from the controls. He stands up, and just narrowly misses hitting his head on the panel above. “All yours.”

He absolutely does _not_ flounce.

James slips into the cockpit with a smirk, and smoothly pushes a series of buttons that quickly have the engine roaring into life beneath them. “Better buckle up for take-off,” he says.

Steve takes a seat in the cabin. It’s more comfortable back there anyway. He watches idly out the window as the plane starts to move forwards, faster and faster, until they lose touch with the ground and propel into the sky, the whole compound shrinking beneath them into nothing more than a toy town. 

He should start thinking about what they’re going to do when they get there. Maria had sent them through plans of the base; somewhere around here there’s a remote-thingy that lets you pull stuff like that up on the cabin’s giant computer screen. He fishes about amongst the clutter on the coffee table. Someone should really clean this place up a bit, he thinks, as instead of the tablet he finds three of Nat’s widow’s bites, someone’s earpiece (Clint’s?), a partially disassembled hairdryer, copies of _Cosmopolitan, Guns & Ammo, _and the _New York Times_ from two weeks ago, and a book with a throwing knife slid between the pages two-thirds in. Steve picks the book and turns it over, careful not to dislodge its makeshift bookmark. _A Tree Grows in Brooklyn_.

Steve has to close his eyes for a moment, overwhelmed by a sudden flashback of Bucky curled up in his sleeping bag with his beaten up Armed Services Edition of the same book. He’d traded two rations’ worth of Luckies for it; by that point it had gone through at least three other hands and was falling apart at the seams.

“Should be there by ten hundred, local time,” says James, dropping into the seat opposite Steve.

Steve starts. The plane’s levelled out, he realises. “Is this yours?” he asks, waving the book at James.

James looks at it, and then nods. “Secret santa present,” he says. “You read it?”

“Yeah. Long time ago.” So have you, Steve wants to say. You loved it, it made you cry. Instead, he puts it back on the table and undoes his seatbelt. “It’s good.”

“Would you say it’s an accurate reflection of your childhood?” James asks, and Steve doesn’t flinch at the clinical way James talks about Steve’s past like it’s something he had no part in; just carries on sorting through the junk on the table, tidying it into neat piles.

“Bits of it,” he says. “It’s set earlier though. Before the First World War.” The Great War, he still calls it sometimes in his head. “Why?”

James shrugs. Steve wonders who gave it to him. It’s a thoughtful gift, if a little bold. Avenging involves just as much hurry-up-and-wait as regular soldiering, and James seems to pass it in much the same way Bucky used to, always with a book to hand. Bruce, Steve thinks. Or maybe Sam.

Steve’d got Pepper. He’d done her a drawing of Tony, looking animated. He hadn’t wanted to ask Tony to sit (the number one rule of Avengers Secret Santa being don’t tell Tony who you’ve got), so it’s based on a sketch he surreptitiously made while asking a series of increasingly incredulous questions about microwaves. Nothing will ever cure Steve of doodling on his briefing papers, but that was the first time in a long while he’d picked up a pencil with intention. It was nice. He feels suddenly wistful for the rainy Sunday afternoons he spent sketching Bucky stretched out on their beaten-up couch with a book.

Steve’s own present hasn’t appeared yet, but there’s still fifteen hours left of Christmas Day (more, even, in Arizona), so he’s not too bothered. His teammates are exactly the kind of people to fedex something last minute from across the world rather than just hand deliver it three days early.

Ah-ha. Steve finally spots the controls, buried under a set of blueprints to — is that the Taj Mahal? Why does everybody have to leave their crap on the plane? It’s a waste of fuel, surely, to carry around this much unnecessary junk all the time. Steve already feels bad enough about his carbon footprint. Maybe he should float the idea of a cleaning roster. It wouldn’t be popular, but somethings are more important than popularity. Like discipline, and the ability to _find_ your _equipment._

Steve carefully rolls up the set of blueprints and uses the controls to pull up the info Maria’s given them on their target. Based on these plans, the base they’re heading for is little more than a collection of prefab shacks in the middle of the desert, but Steve doubts the plans are accurate. They never are, with Hydra. Actually, Steve’s yet to met an evil organisation that doesn’t love to burrow down and build endless top-secret sub-levels.

Steve scribbles down a few strategy ideas in his notebook all the same (he prefers to work through his thoughts on paper, still), then he turns the computer off and slumps back in his chair. 

Across from him, James has buried his head in his book. Steve looks at the window. No rain, of course; instead there’s a delicate cobweb of ice. Steve flips to a new page in his notebook and settles in.

He’s outlined the broad sweep of James’s shoulders, passably captured the way his loose hair is tucked neatly behind his ears, and is just getting started on the gentle furrows of his brow, when James looks up from the struggles and triumphs of Francie Nolan and catches him at it.

“What are you doing?” says James.

Steve’s pencil freezes on the page. “Just… doodling.”

“Me?”

“Sorry, yeah,” says Steve. “I was just killing time.”

James looks at him, like he’s trying to figure out what Steve’s game is. “Fine,” he says, eventually. “Whatever.” He tucks his nose back into his book.

Steve takes that as permission to keep drawing. He thinks he could probably sketch this face with his eyes closed, he’s done it so many times, but he forces himself to really look, to draw exactly what’s in front of him. There’d been a brief, blissful three month window after Steve left school but before his mother had died, where he’d managed to scrape together enough money for real art classes, and during still life practice his teacher used to implore them all to ‘draw the real banana’, much to the amusement of the class — the point being that you had to draw the fruit as it really was, not what you thought it should look like. It might be advice that’s good for more than just drawing, Steve thinks uncomfortably, but he’s not going to delve into that right now.

“So this morning,” says James, after a few moments of silence have passed. “What was that about?”

“I was just trying to do something nice,” Steve says, looking down at his page. “I failed, obviously.”

James lets out a snort. Steve looks up, surprised. He doesn’t think he’s ever heard anything even approximating a laugh from James.

“I kinda thought that was the point,” says James.

“What do you mean?”

“You know. Performative ineptitude, to guilt me into the Christmas spirit.”

“No,” says Steve, evenly. “I’m just really bad in the kitchen.”

“You weren’t even trying to put it out,” says James. “You were just kind of staring at it. You, who couldn’t be a passive bystander to a fucking paper cut.”

So this is what it feels like to be skewered by someone who claims to barely know you. The trouble is, Steve can’t easily explain his complete failure to react, except to say that it had felt like he was watching more than just fifty dollars worth of beef going up in flames, although that was bad enough ( _fifty dollars!_ He’d had to drop three times that into the City Mission bucket outside the store, just to ease his conscience _)_ ; it had felt like what he was watching burn was all his secret hopes for this Christmas, the ones he hadn’t even really admitted to himself.

“What was your plan, then?” says James. “Because I don’t remember you _asking_ me if I wanted roast beef.”

“You would have told me not to bother,” says Steve, tired of pretending indifference. “And I wanted to bother. _I_ wanted roast beef. And I wanted to share it with you. Even if that just meant leaving a plate outside your door and hoping you’d eat it.”

James raises his eyebrows, but he doesn’t respond, just turns the page and goes back to his book.

Steve puts down his pencil.

“Finished?” says James. “Let me see.”

Steve looks down at his sketch. It’s rough, but inoffensive, surely? He hands the notebook to James.

James studies it carefully. “Huh. You made me look almost human.”

“You are human,” Steve says.

James hands back the notebook. “Sure.”

“Why would you doubt that you’re human?” Steve asks. He has an unpleasant thought. “Was it Tony? Did Tony tell you he thinks you’re a clone?” His voice sounds slightly shriller than he intends, but he might actually kill Tony if Tony’s been sharing that particular hypothesis.

“He told me I _could_ be a clone,” James says. “He didn’t tell me he _thinks_ I’m a clone. Did he tell you he thinks I’m a clone? Because that was just one theory of many, before, but now it’s starting to seem uncomfortably possible.”

“You’re not a clone,” says Steve. “I asked Bruce, he said Tony’s just stirring.”

“He might just have been trying to make you feel better. He’s worried about you. They’re all worried about you.”

“What?” says Steve.

James gestures vaguely around. “Your friends. Your gang. They all think you’re gonna lose it.”

Steve frowns. “I’m fine.”

James laughs again. It’s a mean laugh. Steve would like to say it doesn’t sound anything like Bucky, but of course that’s not true. Bucky could be mean, just like anybody else, and that’s the exact laugh Steve would get when he’d tell Bucky he was well enough to go outside.

“You’re not a clone,” Steve says, again. “I made Bruce explain it all to me. Genetics. He said the scientists are still squabbling over the details but there are some things genes definitely don’t control.”

“Like what?”

Steve frowns again. Bruce hadn’t actually given any examples, now he comes to think of it. “Like being a pain in my ass,” he says. “Your ma was a saint and everybody loved George Barnes, so I don’t think that’s genetic.”

Steve had meant it as a joke, but James just scowls slightly. “Also, there’s the accent,” he says, hurriedly.

“I don’t have an accent,” says James. “Why does everyone keep saying I have an accent?”

Steve opens his mouth, but he doesn’t know what to say. The Winter Soldier’s flat, blend-in-anywhere voice is mostly gone, replaced by one that sounds exactly like Steve’s childhood, like a Brooklyn that doesn’t exist anymore. Like Steve himself had sounded, once, before the army had got their hands on him, before they’d smoothed out his vowels along with his spine. Even now he can feel something in his brain responding, his tongue trying its best to slur his own words into not-quite forgotten rhythms.

Once, somewhere in the French countryside, they’d run into some guys from a black unit — they were from Tennessee, Steve thinks, or maybe one of the Carolinas, but wherever it was it wasn’t Georgia, and yet even so Gabe’s usually slight southern accent had intensified tenfold, peppered with phrases Steve didn’t understand. Monty’s accent was always stronger when they were on English soil, stronger yet when they were in an English pub; Peggy’s was always posher in meetings with the British brass. Instinctive, automatic; a sign of belonging. Which is why Steve’s been resisting the urge to do the same, tamping down whatever part of him is reacting in kind to James’s voice. James has made it clear there’s no sense of belonging between them, and that’s fine. But has he really not noticed the lost of the Soldier’s smooth neutrality?

There’s a sudden chime from the flight deck that thankfully saves Steve from answering. “Time to land?” he asks, hopefully. It’s starting to feel a bit much, this one-on-one, a twisted version of the exact intimacy he’s been craving for months and months.

“Guess so,” says James. He sticks the knife back in his book and heads for the cockpit.

—

When James touches the plane down on the red dirt, about a half mile from the base, Stark is there waiting. He’s wearing his ridiculous metal suit, but his helmet is up, and he’s leaning against the frame of an open-top jeep, in which Natasha Romanov is sitting. James can’t read her face from this distance, but he suspects it’s not happy.

Steve is hovering by the door, waiting impatiently for James to release the lock. James can read _his_ expression just fine: it’s grim, jaw tight, the one that says, ‘I’m going to drown my problems in the blood of my enemies’. James sighs and pushes the botton to open the door, puts the man out of his misery.

“You can’t have been at the beach,” Stark is saying, when they approach. “You can’t have driven from the beach to the middle of the Arizona desert in that time. Not in a jeep.”

“Says you,” says Romanov. She nods at Rogers and James. “Hello, boys.”

Stark turns to look at them. “You better not have scratched my jet, Barnes,” he says.

“I thought it was the team jet,” says Rogers. “And maybe _I_ flew.”

Stark scoffs, and James has to resist the urge to cuff his ear.

“Plane’s fine,” he says, instead. He looks at Natasha. “I thought you were on vacation?”

Romanov’s expression is mutinous. “So did I. Apparently you might need help.”

Stark looks unimpressed. “There’s nobody there,” he says. “It’s abandoned. I flew over it. Nothing.”

“And the signal?” says Rogers.

A flicker of doubt passes over Stark’s face. “I’ve done some readings,” he says. “But I dunno. I can’t figure it out.”

“So we go in,” says Rogers. He’s calm now, in charge. “What do you reckon, approach on foot?”

Romanov looks at James, and he can tell she’s thinking what he’s thinking. He scrunches up his face in wordless agreement.

“It doesn’t really matter,” she says. “There’s absolutely no cover. If there’s someone there they’ll see us coming no matter what. Might as well take the jeep in case we need to get away fast.”

The base certainly _looks_ abandoned, when they finally reach it, but it doesn’t take them long to figure out that the handful of empty buildings on the surface are just a front for a large, sprawling underground complex. Rogers decides the only way to cover it all is for the four of them to split up. It wouldn’t be how James would call it, if he was calling the play, but he’s not, so does as he’s told and heads off to the north-west quadrant.

It’s quiet and there’s a layer of dust over everything; it seems just as empty as the buildings above ground. James wonders idly if this is somewhere he’s been before; if he spent years of his life in a deep-freeze down one of these darkened corridors.

If James is honest, he doesn’t like Hydra-related missions all that much. He knows he’s supposed to enjoy them; get a kick out of doling out retribution. Rogers certainly seems to. But James can’t quite muster up the enthusiasm for revenge. He can’t see the point; so far, it seems to be true what they say. Cut off one head and two more will grow. If that’s the case, then James would really rather just stay out of it, given the choice. But he isn’t given the choice; nobody seems to care much what James thinks, least of all Steve Rogers, so James just suits up and picks out his best gun, so that if necessary he can shoot twice as many heads.

James doesn’t find anything, and on the scanner Stark gave him the signal isn’t getting any stronger. There’s nothing coming through on the comms either, nothing of substance at least. Stark, who doesn’t have an ounce of military discipline and seems to think the comms are primarily for cracking wise, is keeping up a steady stream of chatter that the other two are mostly ignoring, but as far as James can tell he hasn’t found anything either.

Stark finally seems to get tired of the sound of his own voice, and James uses the silence to consider the endless possibilities of winter citrus (he’s been watching Masterchef reruns and last night this girl had done something with blood oranges and snapper that’s really set his gears turning). Or at least he tries, but his mind stubbornly keeps returning to the best way to roast beef, the best vegetable parings, the fact that while Rogers had really done a number on that joint, it wasn’t hopeless, it was probably still raw in the middle, could probably still be rescued, the fact that, goddamm it, given five more minutes alone in that kitchen with Rogers looking pathetic, James would probably have offered to do exactly that. James scowls, tricked by his traitorous brain into confronting a truth he’d rather ignore, when, thankfully, there’s a burst of static in his ear and Rogers says, “Found it. South-west corner, down a set of stairs. There’s another level under this one.”

“Of course it is,” says Stark. “Creepy mysterious signal, of course it’s going to be coming from the creepy mysterious second basement.”

James looks down at his scanner. Thankfully, before Rogers had decided they should all split up, Stark had made sure they could all find each other again. Rogers’ location is a pulsing blue dot not that far south of where James is now.

“I’m on my way,” James says. “ETA three minutes.”

“Great. Met me down there.”

“ _Steve_ ,” says Romanov. “Wait for James, he’s right behind you. You need cover.”

“Negative, Nat,” says Rogers. “We don’t know what the signal is. It could be a bomb. There’s no time. I’m going in.”

James swears and starts to run.

—

Steve opens the door at the bottom of the stairs and immediately realises it’s a trap. Not a very good trap, but a trap all the same. There’s about twenty guys in the room, which is large and empty, and they’re all geared up like they’ve been expecting him. When they spot him they all turn and grin, like they think they’re fucking geniuses or something.

Steve doesn’t hesitate, just sends his shield flying. They’re all still standing in a clump, of course, so it manages to take out five at once. He follows it, takes out another two with a tackle and a third with a well-placed punch, and grabs his shield off the ground. Now he’s the one grinning, while they scramble and try to regroup.

He makes short work of the rest of them. They’re not well-organised and they’re slow: these aren’t Hydra’s best people, they’re just some guys who, in the absence of orders from above, decided to take some initiative. Nobody ever actually wants the minions to show initiative, Steve thinks, but that’s okay; he’s about to cure them of it. He kicks a guy in the head, and there’s a pile of bodies at his feet; he must be almost done.

He takes a breath, and of course that’s when he feels cold steel at his temple. A gun. “Captain America,” says the guy who’s snuck up behind him. “How nice of you to join us.”

It’s fine. The guy’s not going to shoot him, Steve’s pretty sure. They didn’t lure Captain America here just to kill him, and even if they did, the bad guys are always too gun-shy to just get on with it. Point-blank range, just like this, would be the way to do it, if you actually wanted to. Steve’s not Bruce; he wouldn’t survive that. Simple and effective. And yet they always have their convoluted schemes: shark tanks and bone saws and once, honest to god, they tied him to train tracks, like something out of one of Bucky’s old comics. So Steve’s not worried: the guy’s not going to shoot him, all Steve’s got to do is keep him talking and wait for the right moment to kick his legs out from under him and get the gun.

Except, before Steve can open his mouth, a gun goes off. It takes him a split-second to realise it’s not the gun at his temple; that that gun has fallen away and is lying on the ground. He spins around and sees James standing in the doorway, rifle on his shoulder. The goon’s on the ground — or at least his body is. His head’s in pieces all over the place.

“I had him on the ropes,” says Steve. 

“Sure,” says James. He studies the pile of groaning bodies with a grim expression on his face. “What a fucking mess.”

Steve wipes brain matter off the back of his neck. “Thanks,” he says.

James looks at Steve. This is where the real Bucky would be pissed at him for unnecessarily walking into danger. But James just nods. “Yeah, whatever,” he says. 

—

The signal’s nothing, just junk sending nonsense out to the sky. The Hydra guys are dopes and they don’t know anything. The whole mission’s a waste of time, as far as James can tell.

Stark heads back to his girl, the others take the jet back to the compound. This time, James spends the journey up front in the cockpit, trying to tune out the sound of Romanov in the cabin, upbraiding Rogers for failing to follow protocol and wait for back-up. He feels strangely exhausted, wrung out in a way the fairly straightforward mission doesn’t really justify.

It’s late when they arrive back; by the time they’d cleared up and dealt with the goons, it had been well past nightfall in Arizona; on the east coast it’s not technically even Christmas anymore. James forgoes his usual bath in favour of a quick shower and takes his gear back to the weapons locker; he’s not allowed to keep a gun in his rooms. (He’s got three stashed on his balcony and one out his bedroom window.)

He’s halfway through cleaning his rifle when Rogers finds him there. He stands awkwardly in the doorway, watching James, but doesn’t say anything.

James ignores him. Rogers doesn’t leave. James sighs. “ _What_ , Steve?”

Rogers gives him a funny look, and James realises he called him Steve.

“Is there anything I can help you with?” James asks, pointedly. Rogers isn’t there to store anything. He’s allowed to do what he wants with his weapons, such as they are, and James wouldn’t be surprised if he sleeps with that shield as a pillow.

“Oh,” says Rogers, lifting a sheepish hand to rub the back of his neck. He’s still in his ridiculous spandex, but he’s taken his mask-thing off, leaving him with sweaty hat-hair. “Sorry. Um. No, I guess not.”

But still, he hovers. James waits, eyebrows raised. He hopes Rogers’ not here to thank him with any kind of sincerity for saving his life. It’s happened a couple of times now, people directing their expressions of gratitude towards him. Usually strangers, people who don’t know who or what James is, just that he’s with the Avengers. It makes James uncomfortable: he doesn’t know what to do with it, and he can’t help but feel like there’s an implication of some kind of… beneficence involved, like he’s someone who’s made a deliberate decision to do good, rather than what he is, which is a gun pointed by someone else.

Nobody told him to follow Rogers down there, of course, but they didn’t need to. He’s well trained, he can anticipate a need. ‘Save Captain America’ is an order he knows to follow without being told.

But no, when Rogers finally opens his mouth, it’s not gratitude that pours out. “You didn’t need to do that, you know,” Rogers says. “Shoot that guy. I had it under control.”

James stares. He can tell it’s not his normal stare, blank-faced and menacing: for a start, his jaw seems to have fallen open without his direction. He closes it. “Are you mad that I killed the guy with a gun to your head?”

“I’m not mad,” Rogers says.

“What did you want me to do?” says James. “Let him shoot you?”

“That wouldn’t have happened,” says Rogers.

“Of course not,” James says, and it comes out as a sneer. “Captain America doesn’t need help.”

“No! It’s just, Clint says you have a thing,” Steve says. “About killing people. So I’m just saying. You didn’t have to.”

James feels that like a punch to the gut. So they’ve been talking about him, have they? Of course they have. He doesn’t know why he’s surprised. “Great,” he says. “That makes me feel so much better about it, _now_.”

Rogers’ face twists with an expression that might be guilt, or pity. James hates it. “Me not killing people is not an option, Rogers,” he says, his voice hard. “You know that. You wanna keep my bodycount down? Stop doing stupid shit.”

Rogers stiffens. He doesn’t look like he’s dithering in the doorway anymore; any hesitancy in his posture is long gone, both feet planted firmly shoulder’s width apart — _at ease, soldier!_ — hands clenched by his sides. A fighting stance. “I was fine,” he says. “Those guys weren’t a threat.”

“You were not fucking fine, Steve!” says James. It’s happening again. He’s exploding. All of a sudden he wants to hit something, wants to wring Steve’s neck. “Why do you always do this? You’d be bleeding out on the street and you’d still insist you don’t need help. Why can’t you just take the hand that’s offered to you, for once in your goddamn life?”

For a second, Rogers blinks at him, James’s own shock mirrored back at him. Then the stubborn prick sets his jaw, like he always does, ready to duke it out.

“How would you know?” he spits. “You don’t fucking _know_ me, remember?”

“I goddamn wish I didn’t know you,” says James. He’s on his feet now, although he doesn’t remember standing, striding towards Rogers, who looks braced for impact, glaring back at James, radiating fury. James feels a split second of satisfaction at managing to provoke a reaction in Rogers that for once can’t be described as ‘forlorn puppy’, only to be brought short by the fact that he’s suddenly here, as close to Rogers as it’s possible to be without touching, and he doesn’t know what he’s here to do. Hit Steve? Distantly he can hear the whir of engines, a sickening crunch, feel a hot wetness spilling onto his knuckles — he blinks, and it’s gone, but Steve’s face is still there, a hint of uncertainty slipping in amongst the anger, like he’s wondering the same thing.

“For the love of god,” says James, grabbing Rogers by the collar — or rather, two fistfuls of fabric near the shoulders; that stupid suit doesn’t have much of a collar to grab — and pushes him up against the door jam. He still doesn’t really know what he’s doing, but he knows it’s not violence propelling him forward. He’s not going to punch him, he’s going to— _kiss him._

If the squawk Rogers makes is anything to go by, it surprises him as much as surprises James, but Rogers kisses back, and it’s warm, and wet, but in a good way, and so James decides not to think about any of it too hard, and for a moment, it’s nice. Somehow, James knows that if he moves his mouth the right way, Steve will let out a little whimper — just like that — and open his lips, and ooh, there’s Rogers’ tongue. Rogers’ arm is tight around James’s back like it’s the only thing stopping him from sliding onto the floor, and when James slips a leg between Rogers’ thighs he can tell he’s been causing some stirrings of his own inside that lycra.

But then, just like that, the moment passes and suddenly Rogers is pushing him away, a confused expression on his face. “James?” Rogers says, but James can’t hear him, because something in his brain is exploding and he’s somewhere else entirely.

—

“You can’t keep doing that, Buck,” says Steve. He looks furious, like Bucky tried to punch him, not kiss him, and he’d quite like to return the favour. He only just comes up to Bucky’s chest, but Bucky knows that it’ll hurt plenty if Steve does decide to whale on him.

“Aw, Stevie, c’mon,” says Bucky.

“We talked about this.”

“You talked.”

“You can kiss me all you like, you know you can, but not if you’re going to just go out tomorrow with Mavis Wetherby.”

“I haven’t seen Mavis Wetherby in months,” says Bucky, exasperated.

“Whoever it is this week, then,” spits Steve. He really does look mad; even more mad than last week, when he caught a group of kids throwing rocks at an alley cat and had waded in in furious defense. He looks a bit like the alley cat, come to think of it.

Only five minutes ago he’d been looking sweet as pie. Bucky’d got home from work, and when he walked through the door Steve had looked up from where he was drawing at the kitchen table and smiled, a soft, sleepy, domestic sort of smile, and Bucky wanted to kiss him, so he had. And it had been nice, for a second, until Steve remembered he didn’t kiss Bucky anymore, and all hell broke loose.

“I haven’t got any dates lined up this week,” says Bucky. “You used to like it when I kissed you.”

“I love it when you kiss me,” says Steve. “I love _you_. But I’m not interested in just being the one that keeps your bed warm when you can’t find someone else to do it.”

“Steve,” says Bucky, trying not to flinch at the l-word. “That’s not what this is.”

Steve crosses his arms. “Oh yeah?” he says. “What is it then, Bucky? You tell me.”

Bucky swallows. He doesn’t know what to call it. If he says it’s the one good thing in his life, Steve will think it’s just a line, and then he’ll be even more mad. Steve wants him to say it’s like what he had with Mavis Wetherby, but it’s not. It can’t ever be like it was with Mavis Wetherby because if Bucky told his ma he wanted to spend the rest of his life with Mavis Wetherby she’d be over the moon and if he told her he wanted to spend the rest of his life with Steve she’d have a fit. All the people he knows — his neighbours, the guys he works with, the people he went to school with; they’d be happy if Bucky wanted to marry Mavis Wetherby — or, well, some of the girls might not be happy, exactly, but they’d put a brave face on it. They’d come to his wedding and throw confetti on the church steps, and when Mavis had their first baby, the guys would probably all stand him a drink to celebrate. If they knew he wanted to marry _Steve_ , they’d be more likely to throw rocks than confetti, just like the alley cat. No wedding, definitely no baby; quite possibly a jail cell.

But the other thing that’s different is that Bucky doesn’t care two hoots about Mavis fucking Wetherby. She’s nice enough, smart and pretty, but she’s Mavis, not Steve, and Steve… Bucky doesn’t want anyone throwing rocks at Steve, and he definitely doesn’t want Steve ending up in jail. But Steve has never had any sense of self-preservation, and so he doesn’t understand. The girls are what keep them safe. As long as Bucky keeps going out with a different girl every Saturday, he and Steve are just a couple of bachelors who can’t settle down. Without them, they’re two guys who live together and spend all their time cooped up alone, and that gets fishy. 

One day, of course, one of the girls is going to have to stick, but Bucky thinks they’ve got a few years yet, and for now, everything’s fine. Or it would be, except Steve wants more, Steve wants things Bucky knows they can’t ever have.

“I don’t know,” Bucky says, finally. “It is what it is. It’s you and me.”

Steve doesn’t look impressed.

“What do you want me to say, Steve?” Bucky says. “I love you too, doll, and the girls don’t mean a thing?”

“ _Yes_ ,” says Steve.

Bucky closes his eyes. It would be easy. Easy, and goddamn true. But it wouldn’t do them any fucking good in the long-term. “Steve,” he says.

“What?” says Steve. “Would the sky fall, if you admitted you like me better than Mavis Wetherby?”

“Of course I like you better than Mavis Wetherby!” Bucky says. “I haven’t seen Mavis Wetherby since there was goddamn snow on the ground!” He knows this, because Steve had caught a cold, and Bucky had stayed home to look after him, and stood Mavis up, and Mavis had told him he needn’t come around anymore, and that had been the end of that. It’s _May_ ; Bucky doesn’t have a goddamn clue why Steve’s decided to fixate on Mavis fucking Wetherby now.

“I can’t do this anymore Bucky,” Steve says. “You’ve got to decide. Either we’re just friends and roommates, and I’ll sleep in my bed and you can sleep in yours, or—”

“Or what, Steve? We’re each other’s one and only, and we’ll ask Father Matthews to post the banns next week?”

“Yes,” says Steve, stubbornly. “Not the bit about the banns, obviously — I don’t need you to tell Father Matthews, I don’t need you to tell anyone at all. But I want to be your one and only. I don’t want to wait up while you’re out with Mavis Wetherby—”

“What the hell did poor Mavis do to you, Stevie? Christ.”

“—or some other girl,” continues Steve, “wondering if this is the one you’re finally going to fall in love with; the one you’re gonna marry.”

“I’ve got to get married eventually,” Bucky says. “We both have. Don’t you want a family?”

“Not especially,” Steve says. “But if you do, fine. But you can’t just keep stringing me along.”

“Stevie,” says Bucky, a little helplessly. He didn’t think that was what he was doing. He thought they both knew the score; things were the way they were.

Steve shakes his head. He doesn’t look angry anymore, just sad. “It hurts, Buck,” he says, and gets Bucky, right where it stings. The last thing he wants to do is hurt Steve.

He picks up his coat and hat from the chair he flung them on when he came in. “Okay,” he says, simply. “I think I’ll sleep on Ma’s couch tonight; give us both some space.”

Steve stares at him, and nods, and Bucky leaves.

—

James is running up the stairs, running and running; he’d been somewhere in the bowels of the compound, but he’s near the surface now, and he’s there and he’s out the door and—

“Fuck,” he shouts. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck SHIT!” He’s outside and it’s the twenty-first century, late December, the middle of the night, and he hasn’t got any fucking shoes on, let alone a coat, and the goddamn door has just slipped shut behind him. “FUUUUCK.”

He hops over to the low stone wall that surrounds the shrubbery a few yards along, cursing with each step. It’s hardly warmer than the ground, but James is wearing thick trackpants and there’s a hole in his left sock, so he sits down, tucking his feet underneath him for warmth. He swears a few more times and then takes a few deep breaths. “Goddamn.”

He doesn’t know what he was thinking; he doesn’t know what possessed him. He _kissed_ _Captain America_. And then — that was a memory, he’s pretty sure. Was Bucky Barnes taking his brain back? James tests, gingerly, but he doesn’t remember anything else. He still doesn’t remember his ma, even though he now knows she would have liked it if he married Mavis Wetherby. He remembers Mavis Wetherby, vaguely, like a memory of a dream. She’d had chestnut brown curls and pretty hazel eyes, and she’d made him laugh but it hadn’t been enough, because he’d been in love with Steve. Rogers. The man he’s just assaulted and then run away from.

Christ. The Winter Soldier never had problems like this. James straightens one leg out in front of him to inspect the tip of his big toe, poking out of his sock. It’s not blue yet, but it is very pale. He’s probably got about half an hour max before frostbite sets in. He pats down his pockets and luckily finds his phone.

He looks at it morbidly. If he calls Romanov, she’s going to ask questions. He sighs, and calls Stark.

“I’m locked out,” he says. “Can you get your robot to let me in? North-west stairwell.”

—

Steve gets back to his room and finds a present waiting at the end of his bed, neatly wrapped in green paper. He stares at it dumbly for a moment, and then realises his secret santa must have finally delivered. He opens it mechanically, his mind still stuck downstairs, on the feeling of James’ body pressed against him, another man’s lips — _Bucky’s_ lips — on his. He feels bad for pushing James away; he wants find him and explain that it was only the surprise. Steve got… fussy… about what Bucky was prepared to give him before, turned his nose up because it wasn’t enough. Now the only thing he regrets more is not jumping out of that train himself. So whatever James wants, Steve will give him. He’s gonna take whatever James will give.

The paper in Steve’s lap parts, revealing a red hand-knitted scarf. Steve squints at it, surprised. Whatever it he was expecting, it wasn’t that. Red is the wrong word, he realises. Vermilion. He’d had a set of fancy paints from when he’d won the St Mary’s High art prize and the vermilion had always been Bucky’s favorite. Steve had struggled to distinguish it from the other colors, had avoided using the paints most of the time for exactly that reason, but when he did he always asked Bucky for guidance, and Bucky would always steer him towards the vermilion, no matter the subject. “You’d get me to paint the sky red,” Steve said. 

“Sometimes the sky _is_ red,” Bucky said. He shrugged. “It’s a good color. Bold. Suits you.”

Steve was in Europe before he saw a red sky. He thought it was on fire; it had been beautiful, and terrible. 

Steve picks the scarf up. It’s not going to win any prizes, that’s for sure. Winnie Barnes had been a prolific knitter, and the scarves and socks and sweaters she’d made for Bucky (and for Steve) had always been beautifully crafted, with uniform rows of tiny, springy stitches. The scarf in Steve’s hands is oddly dense; there’s very little give when he pulls at it, and at one end the sides swell out, like its creator had struggled to contain it at first. But it’s soft, and when Steve puts it on it smells like gun oil and cigarette smoke.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> People stuck inside can have an update, as a treat

Natasha still hasn’t told Steve about the Hydra operation that’s sprouted up in his hometown. She’s still hoping it won’t be necessary, that they’ll turn out to be just as feckless at their colleagues in Arizona. She and James have been keeping a weather eye on the slimy Vincent Cliff, ringleader of this new Brooklyn chapter, but they still don’t know exactly what he’s up to in his warehouse, only that he’s been courting half the local mob.

Today he’s headed to the home of one Vasily Grasinski: Brighton Beach kingpin and nasty piece of work. In a blunt, unsophisticated kind of way, but with aspirations to something more; to silk scarves and clean hands.

It appears Grasinski likes to test out his new business associates by inviting them to play a game of chess on his front porch. From what Natasha can tell, Grasinski isn’t even that good at chess, but she’s pretty sure that’s the point. Mobsters of his level are always obsessed with what they think are clever mind games. Is the Nazi desperate enough for Grasinski’s help to let himself lose at chess to a Russian Jew? They’re about to find out, but if Natasha’s honest, she finds she couldn’t care less. The relationship between the two is boring, and obvious: it’ll fall apart as soon as one of them gets what they want. Of course, they both think it’s going to be them. Natasha would have her money on Cliff, except there’s a tiny spark of — a twisted sort of patriotism, she supposes, that tells her not to discount the Russian mafia too soon. Blunt brutality gets the jar open quicker than puzzling over fulcrums, after all.

Natasha knows why Grasinski’s on the fence; she knows why he’s going to accept. Because Little Odessa’s not what it used to be. The heyday of multi-million dollar drug deals and lucrative protection rackets are over; people still fear Grasinski, but not the same way. They cross the street to avoid him, they turn a blind eye, but they don’t submit to him, not like they used to. The big dogs are long gone from this particular stretch of Brooklyn real estate, and with them the big money, the respect, the _awe_. Grasinski’s willing to hitch his wagon to a man that hates him, if he can get that back. It’s not personal, after all, and Grasinski thinks as little of Cliff as Cliff thinks of him.

All this is to say: Grasinski must think whatever’s in that warehouse is good, good enough to bring mob rule back to Brighton Beach.

It’s Cliff that Natasha doesn’t quite understand. What has he got to gain from doing deals with the likes of Grasinski, a Jewish two-bit thug? Why would a flailing Hydra set up a new enterprise right in the Avengers’ backyard? It doesn’t make sense, and that worries her. Cliff can’t be so stupid that he thinks they’d let him get away with it, can he?

Next to her, James swears loudly, breaking her train of thought. “Problem?” she says.

“Goddamn rollercoaster,” James says.

They’re only a couple of blocks from Luna Park, and even though it’s the off-season, the roar of the rollercoaster rises faintly above the traffic at regular intervals.

“What about it?”

James glares over his shoulder. “Fuckin’ distracting.”

Natasha frowns. Last time they’d gone out on surveillance together the alarm of a car parked across the road had been set off by the wind and had blared at full volume intermittently for two hours and James hadn’t so much as winced.

“Steve said he and…. Bucky used to go to Coney Island,” she says, cautiously.

“I don’t like being called Bucky,” says James. “Doesn’t mean Bucky’s some other guy you have to talk about in the third person.”

Natasha couldn’t care less about James’ identity crisis, except that it’s intruding into their operation. The only thing worse than emotions, Natasha’s come to realise, are the emotions people refuse to admit to. 

“Okay,” she says. “Well, I think you and Steve went on the rollercoaster once or twice.” Twenty-three times. Natasha’s heard the story so often that the thought of the Cyclone makes _her_ want to barf, and Natasha’s vomited exactly three times in her life. “So if it’s making you feel… weird, it’s probably just that.”

“It’s not making me feel weird,” says James.

Natasha doesn’t believe him, but she’s not going to argue. “Okay,” she says, watching as Cliff moves his bishop to c5.

James lowers his binoculars. “I kissed him,” he confesses.

Natasha takes a deep breath. She’s pretty sure by ‘him’, James does not mean Grasinski. “Why?” she asks, evenly.

“Fucked if I know.”

Natasha glances sideways. His face is impassive. “When?”

“Last week. After Arizona.”

“And since?”

“Nothing.”

“ _Nothing?_ ” Natasha says. “Barnes, we had an agreement.”

“It made me remember something.”

That gets Natasha’s attention, what with James’s hitherto extremely forceful denials of his ability to remember anything at all. “What?” she says.

“I’m bad for him,” James says.

Natasha looks down at Grasinski. Pawn to e3. “I don’t care,” she says.

“What?”

“I don’t care. You can’t just throw your hands in the air and say ‘I’m a bad person who does bad things’. That’s a cop out. You’ve got to fix it.”

“Fix _what_?”

“Fix _Steve_ ,” Natasha says. “I don’t think you entirely understand how messed up he is over you.”

“Natalia,” James says. “I know exactly how messed up he is over me. That’s my point. I mess him up.”

Natasha makes an extremely unprofessional fart noise. James looks slightly wounded, like he’d been expecting more sympathy.

“That’s bullshit,” Nat says. “What, you’re helping save him from confusion by not talking to him? You don’t have to give him what he wants, but you owe him an explanation.”

“My therapist says I don’t owe him anything.”

Natasha raises her eyebrows. “Was that before or after you kissed him?”

James doesn’t answer this. “What would I even say?” he says, eventually.

“The truth, I think,” Natasha says. There’s a rich irony in her counselling honesty, but James doesn’t point this out. He doesn’t say anything, just squints down at their mark, and they both watch as below them the game ends. Cliff topples his king with a wry grin — you got me beat! — that nobody’s buying. Grasinski shakes his hand. The deal is done.

“Looks like Grasinski’s in,” says Natasha. “We should bug him. Save us trekking out to this godforsaken place every time Cliff steps out his front door.”

“Yeah,” says James. If Nat was hoping to get a Captain America-style rise out of the Brooklyn dig, she’s disappointed. He just he looks tired.

—

Steve’s heading out to meet Sam for his morning run when he feels someone grab his shirt from behind and pull him into the stairwell.

It’s James. He’s looking squirrelly, eyes darting in different directions, hands fidgeting. Steve wonders if James is going to kiss him again. He’d been taken by surprise before, reacted badly. That won’t happen again. He wonders if James still likes to be kissed the way Bucky liked to be kissed. Steve has kissed more people than you might think, actually, but kissing Bucky was the only time he ever felt like he was actually good at it, like he knew exactly what he was doing.

“I need to talk to you,” James says, looking like he wants anything but.

“Oh?” says Steve, trying to drag his mind back from the distant past and memories of Bucky’s lips.

“I’m sorry,” says James. “About last week. You know.”

“Oh,” says Steve, again. “That’s… it wasn’t… did you not enjoy it?”

“What?” says James. “No, it was — that’s not the point. I shouldn’t have done it.”

“I didn’t mind.”

James stares at him, his nerves seemingly replaced by exasperation. The incredulous expression on his face is so familiar that Steve feels like he could mouth along with the oncoming lecture word for word.

He’s wrong, of course; it’s just an illusion. James doesn’t say anything about Steve’s lack of ‘goddamn self-preservation’, nor does he swear that Steve goes ‘looking for trouble’, a phrase that always made Steve want to tell Bucky he was turning into his ma. Instead, James’s expression hardens, and he says, “I still don’t remember, Rogers. I didn’t kiss you because I had some romantic recollection, I kissed you because my libido’s come back online and I’m horny as fuck, and apparently attraction to you is written into this body’s DNA or something, enough that even a clone would probably be afflicted.”

Steve flushes. “You’re not a clone.”

James ignores this. “I’m not stupid, Steve. I don’t remember it, but I know we’ve got a history, you and I, and I don’t think it was as strictly platonic as the rest of the world seems to think.”

He’s saying this like it somehow adds up to a reason not to kiss Steve, but Steve’s not getting it. “So?” he says.

“So, you want a love story, and I’m just looking to bone.”

Steve laughs. He can’t help it. So maybe this isn’t Bucky’s usual lecture, but it’s familiar ground all the same.

James stares at him. “I can’t give you what you want, Rogers.”

“I know that,” says Steve. “I never asked you to. I never asked for anything. You kissed me.”

“That’s why I’m apologising,” says James.

“Okay,” says Steve. “Fine. Apology accepted. Is that it? I have to go.” He starts heading down the stairs, two at a time.

“Steve.”

Steve turns, his eyes meeting James’s.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” James says softly.

Steve keeps on going. He’s late to meet Sam.

—

Steve remembers clearly the first girl that caught Bucky’s eye. Her name was Christine Templeton.

Bucky had just turned fourteen when he decided that Christine Templeton was someone special. Steve was still thirteen, and he didn’t get the appeal. Christine was fine, he supposed. She had nice hair and she was good at math. But he had no desire to _dance_ with her, which, apparently, Bucky did.

“Those _eyes,_ Stevie, I ain’t never seen a girl with eyes so blue. And those _curls_.” Bucky was obsessed, and he insisted on telling Steve every detail. “And the rest of her ain’t so bad either, Stevie. I don’t want you getting the wrong idea, I don’t want you thinking I’m disrespecting her or nothing, but she’s got one hell of a body; the way it just, _curves_ , you know, buddy, it’s too much. I gotta take her to the dance, I just gotta.”

The curves, Steve mused, couldn’t be denied. The part he didn’t get, was why the sudden appearance of breasts and hips on a girl they’d known since first grade had led Bucky to completely lose his head.

“Jeez, Buck, why don’t you quit mooning and ask her already?” Steve asked, annoyed. It wasn’t like she was gonna say no. Bucky’d filled out just as much, in his own way, and all the girls were falling over him. That, Steve remembers feeling at the time, was sort of understandable. Bucky was tall now, and strong, and funny too, when he wasn’t mooning over Christine Templeton. Steve thought if he were a girl he’d count himself lucky to be asked to the dance by Bucky Barnes.

“I’m gonna!” said Bucky. “I’m gonna, it’s just, it’s delicate Stevie, you gotta do it right.”

Steve rolled his eyes. “Just say what you said to me. About her eyes, not the other stuff. I bet she’ll eat it up.”

“Nah,” said Bucky. “Can’t be that easy.” He paused. “Can it?”

Steve had no idea, and he didn’t really care. “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”

Bucky’s face brightened. “You know, pal, it just might work.”

The next day Steve watched as Bucky sauntered up to Christine in the schoolyard. He was nervous; Steve could tell by the way he worried his cap behind his back, but nobody else would be able to.“Listen, Christine,” Bucky said, like it was no big thing, “I think your eyes are so beautiful that I could just get lost in them for days, and I gotta ask you if you’ll go to the dance with me next Saturday.”

Christine’s friends tittered, Steve sighed, Christine smiled shyly and nodded, and Bucky’s chest puffed right up. And that, thought Steve, was the end of that. Thank god.

Except of course it wasn’t.

Because now Bucky had secured Christine’s company he seemed to think he had some obligation to actually learn how to dance. And somehow, Steve got roped into it, even though he didn’t want to learn, even though he didn’t even plan on _going_ to the dance. Tickets cost a twenty-five cents, and Steve could think of plenty ways he’d rather spend a quarter if he had one.

Neither of them had ever been to a dance before. This one was their first; an opportunity, according to Mr Wilkinson, to “learn to properly respect the opposite sex”. Steve thought it might be a bit late for that, given some of the things he’d overheard in the schoolyard, but, inexplicably, Bucky seemed to be taking it seriously.

Bucky asked Steve’s ma for help. It made sense; they didn’t have any older siblings to ask for guidance, and Bucky’s own ma was a swell lady, she really was, best cook in Brooklyn, but she didn’t like having boys underfoot, or so she said, and so she had a tendency to shoo them out onto the street if they lingered too long in her kitchen. Sarah Rogers was approachable in a way none of the other neighbourhood mothers were, and Steve was proud that it was his ma Bucky went to with his problem, even if Steve thought it was a pretty stupid problem.

“I suppose I could show you the basics,” said Sarah, once Bucky had explained his dilemma. “I don’t know any of these new modern dances, but I could teach you to waltz and foxtrot. Dance a reel too, but I think that will be less useful.”

She was tired though; just come off a long shift at the hospital, and so once she’d demonstrated the steps once or twice she sat down to watch and critique. “Steve can be your practice partner, won’t you, my love?” she said, nudging him. “You must be about the same height as Christine Templeton.”

Christine was a good head taller than Steve, but he didn’t correct his ma, just scowled. But then she said, wistfully, “You father was such a good dancer, Stevie. Before we got married he used to take me out, every Saturday night, and he never failed to sweep me of my feet.”

Steve considered this. He wanted nothing more than to be exactly like his father, although it was a hard thing to achieve when he’d never met him. If his pa had danced, maybe it wasn’t so stupid after all. He looked at Bucky, standing to attention in the middle of the Rogers’ kitchen with a big dumb grin on his face, the strap of his worn-out suspenders sliding off his left shoulder.

“Come on Steve,” said Bucky. “Do your old pal a favour.”

“Fine,” huffed Steve, sliding down from his perch on the kitchen table and moving to stand ungraciously in front of Bucky.

Sarah smiled. “That’s it. Now Steve, you’re going to take the lady’s part, just for today, so that means you put your hand on Bucky’s shoulder, and Bucky, you take Steve’s waist — not too low or Christine will think you’re getting fresh with her — and then you take Steve’s right hand with your left.”

Steve couldn’t help but giggle; it was weird, having Bucky’s hands on him like that. Bucky just quirked his eyebrows, still grinning.

“Perfect,” said Sarah. “Now, you remember the steps? Good, let’s go. One-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three…”

It was tricky; Steve didn’t think he’d inherited his father’s talents. He made a few stumbles at the start — “Oh dear,” said Sarah, “that’s okay, just walk it off” — but it turned out Bucky was pretty good at it, so after a couple of false starts Steve found that if he concentrated carefully on just following Bucky’s lead, it wasn’t too bad. 

“Ooh,” said Sarah. “That’s good, boys, I think you’re getting it.” She reached for the radio and twiddled the dial until she found some actual music, and then suddenly they were actually, properly dancing, and Steve found he was enjoying it in spite of himself. Bucky had always been energetic, unable to stay sitting still for long, and now it felt like that energy — the heat of Bucky, the power, all that unbridled enthusiasm — was in Steve’s hands, and it was a slightly strange but not unenjoyable sensation. And Bucky _was_ enthusiastic, cackling with glee as he whirled Steve faster and faster through the tiny kitchen, delighted to find a new outlet for his restless spirit.

Steve enjoyed it enough that he let Bucky talk him into paying the twenty-five cents, but the dance itself was not so fun. The first girl Steve asked to dance – one of Christine’s friends –  laughed in his face. The second accepted readily, enthusiastically even, but then Steve discovered that dancing without Bucky to guide him was much harder. All that practising in the kitchen and he’d never taken the boy’s part once, he realised, so focused as they all were on getting Bucky ready to sweep Christine off her feet, and suddenly now everything was backwards. The girl Steve was dancing with had been standing against the wall for at least an hour before he’d asked her to dance, and she was clearly trying to make the best of a bad situation, smiling grimly on even as Steve stumbled and tripped, and tried desperately not to steer her into any of the other couples. 

Bucky, on the other hand, was a roaring success. He and Christine had barely stopped dancing once, and the practise had paid off; Bucky was confident, cocky even, radiating joy and dancing with a flair that none of the other boys possessed. Christine looked flushed with happiness, clearly enjoying Bucky’s attention and his skill, as well as the jealous looks of all the other girls.

After his partner had made her escape, Steve asked another girl, but to his relief she politely declined. His ma had said it was rude to leave girls standing on the sidelines without a partner, but also that he wasn’t to be a pest, and he figured two rejections meant his duty was done for now. Instead, he lingered on the side of the dance floor for a while, just watching Bucky move, and he couldn’t help but smile when he thought about what those girls might say if they knew that he’d lived out their hearts’ desire, and had spent the last week dancing in the arms of Bucky Barnes.

That probably should have been it, the lightning bolt moment, but it wasn’t. Bucky always said Steve never stopped to think, and Steve didn’t bother then to consider why, exactly, he felt so smug, just stood there watching Bucky with a smirk on his face, until it was time to go home.

—

“There you are,” says Sam, once Steve finally reaches the park. Then Sam frowns, like he can tell from Steve’s expression that something’s not right. “You alright?”

“Fine,” says Steve. “Let’s go.”

He sets off without waiting for Sam to follow, immediately throwing himself into his run with all of his superhuman might.

 _I don’t want to hurt you_ Steve thinks, and puts on another burst of speed. But it doesn’t work; no matter how much his lungs burn and his legs threaten to drop off, it doesn’t distract him from the memory of James looking soft and sincere in a way, until now, he hasn’t, not once. Only one person has ever looked at Steve with that particular expression, exasperated and sad and protective, all at once, and he doesn’t exist anymore, at least according to James.

As Steve mulishly pounds the pavement, he finds he’s annoyed, actually. _I don’t want to hurt you._ True, when James had kissed him, Steve had got that familiar sense, that This Is Going To Hurt feeling. These days he usually gets it when he stares down monsters and falls off buildings and in the split second between when a gun goes off and when the bullet hits. But in the old days it was — whenever Bucky looked at him with that twinkle in his eye, whenever he caught sight of Bucky and felt that pull deep inside him, in his chest or his fingertips or somewhere behind his navel, drawing him in. This is going to hurt, but also: there’s absolutely nothing you can do to stop it.

Steve has learnt the hard way that resisting the pull hurts just as much as surrendering to it. All that happens then is you end up letting the love of your life slip, quite literally, through your fingers, leaving you with nothing, and you realise that the pain of only having a little bit of them is piddling compared to the great gaping wound of not having them at all.

So Steve is annoyed, because if this was about James — James’s boundaries, James’s need for space, James not liking Steve that way — then that would be fine. Steve would respect that. But if this is about Steve, about what’s best for him, then that’s another story. Because that’s nobody’s business but Steve’s.

He keeps running. There doesn’t seem to be much else he can do.

—

“So you want to send Barton in undercover,” says Fury.

“Thanks to Stark’s bugs, we know Grasinski’s looking for a new body guard,” says James. “He gets invited on regular tours of the Hydra operation, whatever it is, so if we plant Barton as Grasinski’s body guard he should be able to get a glimpse inside.”

“Why not just get him in on the operation itself?”

Clint scratches his nose. “I can only spare a week or two. It’ll look suspicious if one of their new recruits walks off the job that quick.”

“Whereas the mob is famously understanding of people who get cold feet.”

“Oh, Nat’s got that part figured out,” says Clint. “She’s gonna get James to shoot me, it’ll be fucking brilliant.”

“What?” says James. This part is news to him.

“With a blank, Barnes, calm down,” says Natasha.

“I thought they’d cleaned up Brighton Beach,” says Fury. “Do they still get random mob hits?”

“Not very often,” says Natasha. “Which is why it’ll work. These guys are second rate, and there’s nothing a two-bit gangster likes more than being shot at. We’re gonna make Grasinski feel special.”

“Why Barton?”

“Well, obviously my first choice would be the Russian-speaking Brooklyn native,” says Natasha. “But if these guys are actually the real deal then I think they’ll recognise the Winter Soldier.”

“Plus, you’re worried I’ll forget what side I’m supposed to be on,” says James. He’s not sure how he feels about being referred to as a ‘Brooklyn native’.

“I was trying to be nice and not bring that up,” says Natasha. “But it can’t be Steve, and I think Sam’s gonna have trouble blending in. Stark’s out, for obvious reasons—”

“Yeah, we get it Nat,” says Clint. “I’m the last resort.”

“You know I’ll always pick you first, pumpkin, I’m just explaining the operational rationale.”

“Wow, now I just feel patronised.”

“I sense this meeting is deteriorating,” says Fury. “Fine, you have my approval. Report back with what you find out.” He sweeps out of the room.

James looks at Natasha. He leans in, and asks in a low voice, “Do you think I have an accent?”

“Everyone has an accent,” she replies. She does not match his surreptitious tone.

James sighs and gives up on trying to be discreet. “I mean, a different one. From when you first met me.”

“When I first met you, you were speaking Russian,” Nat says. “Born and bred Muscovite, I would have said, if I didn’t know better. But if you’re asking whether you’re starting to sound like you were raised by Danny DeVito and Sylvester Stallone somewhere in Bedford-Stuyvesant, then yes.”

James scowls. “Danny DeVito is from New Jersey,” he says, but from the smirk on Natasha’s face he can tell she knew that already; he walked right into her trap.

‘Fuhgeddaboudit,” says Barton, from across the table. “I’m _walking_ here”.

James counts to ten, slowly, inside his head. “How have you not killed him already?” he says.

“I’m trying not to do that so much,” says Natasha. “Besides, he _likes_ you. That’s how he shows affection.”

“Nobody likes me,” says James.

“Well, not with that attitude,” says Natasha.

“I used to like you,” Clint says. “Then I heard you were talking smack about Harry Potter.”

“Imagine,” James says. “It’s the bottom of the ninth, bases loaded. You’ve been hitting balls all over the field; your team’s on track to win big. But then: someone in the outfield that nobody was paying any attention to randomly collides with a tiny flying ball out of nowhere and that’s it, game over. You’ve lost.”

“Yes,” says Clint. “But also imagine you could fly!”

“You _can_ fly!” says James. “Just steal Wilson’s wings, it’s not like he does a very good job of locking them up.”

“It’s not the same,” Clint says reproachfully. “You know it’s not the same.”

—

Stark is quiet at their first arm session of the new year. James doesn’t like it. He’s come to rely on Stark’s prattle, offensive and inane, to get him through these hours, and Stark’s silence is so out of character it makes him wary, edgier than ever. Stark talks to his robots; Stark talks to his computer. The fact that he’s got an actual human in his lab and he’s not talking means something’s wrong.

Stark,” says James, after ten minutes in which Stark avoids eye contact and barely says a word. “You gonna tell me what’s up? Or are you going to continue to pull apart my arm like you’re halfway through a ten-hour shift at the robot factory and you’re dead inside?”

Stark blinks at him. “When did you start using metaphors?”

“That was a simile,” says James. “I contain multitudes.” Now James thinks about it, Stark didn’t even give James shit when he got locked out, which itself is a pretty glaring deviation from his usual character.

“What do you know about working in a factory?” says Stark. “Say what you like about Hydra, you can’t say they didn’t give you variety.”

James definitely knows more about tedious shift work than Stark, but the source of the knowledge is fuzzy at best. “Yeah, the brain wipes really helped keep the work fresh,” James agrees. He sees Stark’s hand tighten on his screwdriver. Oh yes, something’s up, alright. “Stop trying to change the subject.”

“I’m sorry, am I not being chatty enough?” says Stark. “Didn’t know you wanted the girlfriend experience.”

James has considered muting Stark’s comms feed on nearly every mission he’s been on. “Stark,” he says.

Stark puts down the screwdriver. “I found a chair. In Arizona,” he says, looking over James’s shoulder. “There was a chair.”

“Okay,” says James.

“One of… _those_ chairs.”

“I know the ones,” says James. He’s not surprised. He’s glad he wasn’t the one who stumbled on it, but he’s not surprised.

“They put you in that thing?” says Stark. “That’s how they got you to kill my parents?”

James looks up at him, and realises that Stark’s more shook up by this than he’d guessed. “Yeah,” he says. “I mean, they did other things as well. But that was part of how they did it.”

“Was Cap the target?” says Stark. “Or were you?”

James shrugs. There’s no way to tell, but — “They’re never going to stop trying to get me back,” he says.

“Okay,” says Stark. “Okay.” He looks down at the ground, like he needs a moment to process. But after a few seconds he pulls his head up, takes a deep breath and looks James in the eye. “There’s a kill switch in your arm. To deactivate it. And there’s something else. I think it might be, you know, another kind of kill switch.”

“Poison?” says James.

“I’m guessing,” says Stark. “Hard to tell from the scans. It just looks like a round, empty space. Except it’s conspicuous, and well, that thing’s wired directly into your central nervous system. And those guys are evil fucking bastards, so...”

“Yeah, makes sense,” says James. “Can you get it out?”

“I think so,” says Stark. “I’d wanna run some more tests first. I think there’s a high chance it’s booby-trapped.”

“Okay,” says James.

“I’ve known about this for a month,” says Stark. “And I didn’t tell you. But you trust me to fix it?”

“You’re telling me now,” says James.

Stark doesn’t look convinced. James sighs. “I reckon there are two ways you could screw me here,” he says. “You could fuck it up. But you’re a pretty smart guy, and none of the doctors I’ve had look at the thing have even noticed there’s anything there. They’d definitely fuck it up; seems my chances on that count are best with you.”

“Well, yeah,” says Stark. “Obviously.”

“And then there’s the other thing,” says James. “You could stick in something of your own. Your own kill switch.”

“You’d never even know.”

“Yeah,” acknowledges James, with a nod of his head. He drums his fingers on the side of the bench. “Look, if I was gonna pick a guy to have that kind of power over me it’d be Natasha. She knows what she’s doing and she doesn’t get emotional when making decisions. I might go with Fury, if I didn’t think he’d just delegate the responsibility to someone else, and I don’t like his track record when it comes to the people he delegates responsibility to. But I think I could live with it, if it was you. You’re a little bit emotionally compromised, sure, but nowhere near as bad as Rogers, and you’re arrogant enough to stick to your own path even in the face of a full-scale Captain America meltdown.”

Stark frowns. “Do you _want_ me to put something in there?” he says.

“No,” says James. It would be sensible. They’re never going to stop trying to get him back. But he _doesn’t_ want it, and for whatever reason today that’s reason enough. “But maybe I’m a little emotionally compromised too.” He feels his mouth twitching up into a sardonic grin. “My therapist says it’s a good thing.”

“Well, either way, I’m not going to,” says Stark. He looks James in the eye as he says it, and James finds he believes him. The moment stretches, both of them staring at each other, until it snaps, and Stark claps his hands and says, “Right, Friday, we need to do some full body scans. I want as much info as we can get on what this mystery pocket is and what it’s connected to.”

—

James is only on about half of Steve’s missions, so on when Steve gets the call to suit up and finds himself on a jet to Marrakech without James there, he’s not particularly worried.

But then gets to the part of the in-flight briefing where Hill says, ‘Ideally you’d have a sniper do recon and cover for the approach, but we don’t have anyone available, so—”

“Wait,” says Steve. He knows Clint’s on some undercover mission, but — “What about James?”

Hill pauses, but her pixelated face remains impassive. “Sergeant Barnes is on medical leave, Captain.”

“What for?” Steve asks.

“You know I can’t tell you that,” says Hill.

“He’s fine,” says Tony. “C’mon, Cap, we got a job to do.”

Steve wheels around. “How do you know?”

Tony coughs. “I’m just guessing,” he says. “I think they would have told you if it was life-threatening.”

Steve shakes his head. “No, they wouldn’t.” He knows he’s got no rights when it comes to James, he never has. Bucky had been down as Steve’s next of kin since that day in 1936 when his ma went into the sanatorium and never came out. He probably still was — Steve doesn’t remember nominating anyone new for the twenty-first century. But Bucky had a family, and so Steve had spent the first half of the war knowing that he wouldn’t even know if something had happened to Bucky unless they saw fit to tell him. Steve was reduced to hounding Becca for news whenever it got to be too long between letters, which was always, because the mail was slow and Bucky was lazy. Sometimes Steve lies awake and thinks about what would have happened if he hadn’t been there, hadn’t found out about the 107th from Phillips himself. When would he have found out Bucky was gone? Would the next letter Steve sent simply have come back to him unopened, ‘MIA’ scrawled across it?

Steve can only assume James is on medical leave because he’s gotten hurt somehow, and he didn’t even know James was on a mission. James is no more inclined to let an injury slow him down than Steve is, so it must be pretty bad. Unless he’s sick, some kind of serum-resistant virus? That sounds even worse, and if it’s something like that they probably wouldn’t let Steve see him even if James would allow it. What if it’s something else entirely? What if James has had some kind of relapse, traded in his stormy irritation at Steve and everything he does for a return to the cold blankness of the Winter Soldier? What if James has tried to kill someone, tried to fulfil a Hydra mission, tried to hurt himself?

“Steve,” says Natasha, her tone sharp, cutting through the list of possibilities building unbearably in Steve’s brain. Steve looks down at his hands and finds he’s crumpled his mission notes tightly in his fist.

“Do I need to take you off this mission, Captain?” says Hill.

Steve pulls himself together. His team know that if there’s anything he can do to help James he’ll do it, but for now there’s a situation that requires his attention. “No,” he says. “I’m good. What were you saying about the approach, Agent Hill?”

—

It turns out the mission is a difficult one with a lot of civilian lives at risk, so Steve tamps down his mess of worry and anger and hurt and concentrates on the task at hand. He comes out of it with a few bruises and a nasty gash, and for once he doesn’t resist when Hill sends him straight to medical on his return, even though he hates getting stitches and he knows his healing factor makes them pointless. He ignores the knowing look Natasha gives him at his sudden compliance; ignores the quip the nurse makes about never seeing him conscious; submits to a clucking tongue and gentle hands.

There’s no sign of James that Steve can see, which either means he’s not that poorly, or he’s so bad he’s been moved. He grits his teeth; tries and fails not to fidget as the nurse fixes him up.

“That’s it, hun,” she says, patting a bandage onto his ribs. “Almost done. I just gotta do a couple more checks now, okay?”

She holds up her index finger in front of his nose. “Follow my finger will you, sweets?”

Steve does as he’s told, staring intently as her finger moves side-to-side. “Say,” he says, and then curses himself for starting off by sounding like a rube straight out of the kinds of comics he was reading in 1932. “James isn’t around, is he?”

The nurse puts her hand down and frowns at him.

“I’m not trying to be nosy,” Steve rushes to say. “I just thought — I heard he was on medical leave and I thought if he was stuck down here I could visit. Seeing as I’m here myself.”

“Sergeant Barnes?” the nurse says. “Sorry, sweets, I haven’t seen him in a while.”

“Oh,” says Steve.

“I hope he’s okay,” says the nurse. “We all love Sergeant Barnes down here, he’s such a charmer.”

“Really?” says Steve, surprise getting the better of him. He’s pretty sure nobody has described James as a charmer in, oh, seventy years or so.

“Oh yes,” says the nurse. “If you could just lift your arm for me, darlin’? That’s it.” She straps a blood pressure cuff around his arm. “He’s always making us blush, isn’t he Carol, with the things he says.”

“Who?” says the nurse straightening the next bed over.

“Sergeant Barnes.”

“Oh, Sergeant Barnes!” says Carol, and Steve sees her face light up. He knows that look. That’s a classic Bucky Barnes swoon. “He told me I had the best legs he’d seen in twenty years.”

Steve’s nurse — Marlene, her name tag says — laughs. “Last time I got my hair done he told me I looked like Rita Hayworth,” she tells Steve. “He’s a dreadful flirt, but we enjoy it. And he brings us treats sometimes. He makes these peanut butter cookies that are to die for.” She frowns down at the monitor in her hand. “Blood pressure’s a bit high, hun. Are you feeling okay?”

“Peachy,” says Steve.

—

James gets a two-minute warning, courtesy of Natasha; a text that just says _tell him you’re not dying, james_.

It’s followed by a knock at the door, an insistent, angry, hammer; no more cautious taps; this is the knock of someone who feels like they’ve been lied too, who’s missing information they feel entitled to know.

James braces himself, and opens the door.

“Hill says you’re on medical leave,” says Rogers. His jaw is tight, his hands are clenched, radiating agitation.

“Yes,” says James.

“Why?”

James sighs and moves the left side of his body out from behind the door, revealing the way the sleeve of his sweater dangles empty.

Rogers stares. “What the hell? What happened to your arm?”

James bites back what he wants to say, which is, ‘none of your fucking business,’ and says instead, “you’d better come in.”

James heads for the kitchen, Rogers tailing behind. He starts making a pot of coffee – not because he thinks either of them want any, but because it gives him something to do with his hands — hand. He pulls out the tin of snickerdoodles he made two days ago, when he still had two working arms.

Opening the tin is tricky one-handed though. Instead of distracting Rogers, it leaves him looking stricken. “Let me help,” Rogers says, awkwardly, so James just pushes the tin towards him and waves his hand in a ‘go on’ gesture, before turning around to find a pair of mugs, burying his head in the cupboard for a fraction longer than he needs to, just to give himself a breather. If nothing else, however, his feeble fumbling does appear to have taken the steam out if Rogers — he’s gone quiet, no longer demanding answers.

James spoons sugar into the mugs. He doesn’t usually have any but today he feels compelled. Two each; a rule conjured out of nowhere that feels as immutable as stone. “It’s just temporary,” he says, shrugging his empty shoulder socket, not turning around. “Stark found something, and it turns out it was best to just take the whole thing off for a bit so he could sort it out.”

“Tony?” says Rogers. James turns. Rogers is holding half a snickerdoodle, but James doesn’t think he’s put it anywhere near his mouth, just distractedly crumbled it into pieces in his hands. “What do you mean, Tony found something?”

“He’s been looking at it. My arm. You know how he likes to pull his toys apart.” Beside James the coffee pot gurgles and splutters out the last of the coffee. James reaches for the pot and pours, giving each mug a cursory stir before handing one to Rogers. “And there was something… a little shady looking, you know. On one of the scans he did.”

“No,” says Rogers, a little terse. “I don’t know.” He’s starting to get het up again.

 _It’s my arm_ , James thinks, a little petulantly. “Well,” he says. “There was. And Stark thought — and I agreed with him — that it was most likely something nasty. So we decided it was best if I let him operate.”

“You let Tony do what?” Rogers says.

James sighs. “He took a toxin out of my arm. Or, well, he tried. But it got a bit dicey there. Turns out Hydra really don’t like you messing with their tech.” Bit dicey is an understatement, but James figures Rogers doesn’t need to know exactly how close Stark came to blowing up himself, James, and a significant chunk of the compound. The whole thing was booby-trapped in about six different ways, and once Stark had realised that he’d focused all his energies on just getting the arm off, which had been no picnic either, if Stark’s swearing had been anything to go by.

“So it’s gone?” says Rogers.

James shrugs. “Stark’s doing his best to sort it out,” he tells Rogers. “He thinks he might be able to fix it.”

James wonders what might happen if Stark can’t, and James can’t help the Avengers anymore. Will he be freed from his obligations, or will he be dragged off to prison? James feels lighter, without the arm. But he also can’t open a goddamn tin, so he’s not sure being one-handed forever is what he wants either.

Rogers is just frowning at him, like he’s not sure James is taking this seriously enough. Or maybe like he’s trying to figure out if this is a problem he can solve by throwing his stupid metal disc around. Spoiler, Rogers: it’s not.

“You should eat that,” James says, gesturing to the cookie in Rogers’ hand. “They’re good.”

Rogers stares down at it, like he forgot it was there. Mechanically, he lifts it to his mouth and takes a bite. “What are you going to do?”

“Do?” James repeats. “What do you mean, what am I going to do? Jesus christ, Rogers, I’m on medical leave and my knowledge of complex robotics is minimal. I’m not going to do anything.”

Rogers’ mouth twists miserably. James takes a deep breath. This time he regrets snapping. but he doesn’t know how to respond to Rogers’ dogged persistence. Rogers would never sit back and let someone else take control of his problems, so he assumes no one else would. Or maybe it’s not just an assumption; he knows James better than James does, after all, so maybe he’s right. Maybe Bucky Barnes never liked to sit out on a fight either. James can’t quite imagine feeling that way, but what does he know?

The tense silence is broken by a knock on the door. A jaunty rap—Stark. Thank god, James thinks. Maybe Stark can explain things in a way which will get the sad twisty look off of Rogers’ face.

Stark lets himself in, because of course he does. “How’s my favourite nonagenarian?” he calls out, and then he sees Rogers. “Well, this is awkward,” he says. “You’re great too, Cap, don’t get me wrong, but there’s just something special about Barnes here.”

“I think the something special’s downstairs in your lab,” says James.

“What did you do to him, Tony?” says Rogers.

Stark looks indignant. “I saved his life!” He looks at James. “Did you not tell him I saved your life?”

“What?” Rogers says, wide-eyed.

“I was trying not to focus on the life-threatening aspect of it, actually,” James says, through gritted teeth.

“Whoops,” say Stark. “Well, Cap, nothing to worry about. He’s all in one piece — or, not exactly, I guess, but he’s not dead and there’s no poison capsules or Hydra-controlled explosives attached to him any more, so it’s all good!”

Rogers just stares at him. So much for Stark helping. James thinks Steve might be imagining throwing Stark out the window. It’d be no good, unfortunately; James has considered it before, and Stark never seems to go anywhere without at least one jet propulsion device secreted about his person.

“He’s been disarmed,” says Stark, oblivious. “Get it?”

“If you think I can’t hurt you one-handed Stark, you’re in for a shock,” says James wearily.

“Alright,” says Stark, putting his hands in the air, but he’s grinning. “I get it, you don’t need a metal arm to be a scary motherfucker. But if you did want to go back to two working limbs, I should have something ready for you soon.”

“You fixed it?”

“No. That thing is riddled with—” Tony glances at Rogers, whose twisted expression has been replaced by something blank and unreadable “—bad vibes. I’m making you a new one.”

“A new one?” James doesn’t know how he feels about that. Sure, his arm was evil Nazi tech grafted onto him against his will in order to turn him into a weapon, but it was his evil Nazi tech. He’d had it for as long as he could remember; it was part of him.

“Finest vibranium, baby,” says Stark. “Took me a while to figure out how they got the haptic feedback to work, but I’m pretty sure I’ve cracked it now. I’ll get Friday to let you know when it’s ready to try on.” And with that, he’s gone, as quickly as he came.

James shakes his head. “See Rogers,” he says. “Told you Stark would fix it.”

Rogers still has that odd blank expression. “The nurses in medical said you flirt with them,” he says.

James is so confused by this non-sequitur that he just stares for a moment. He’s friendly with the nurses downstairs, yes. He hates medical, but when he found his arm sessions were almost bearable with Stark’s wittering away he thought maybe the same thing could help get him through his post-mission checkovers. Except, of course, when he started paying attention he realised the nurses were too terrified of him to talk. So he started talking himself, just to loosen them up a little bit, and yes, okay, maybe what ended up coming out of his mouth could be considered ‘flirting’, but it turned out that trying to get the nurses to smile was an even better distraction for his anxiety than thinking up new insults for Stark. Nobody was more surprised than James when realised he was good at it, that he could get Marlene and Carol’s faces to light up just by winking if he tried.

“You jealous?” he says.

“No,” says Rogers. James looks at him doubtfully. Rogers screws up his face. “You can flirt with whoever you like. It’s just… I’ve never so much as seen you smile.”

Ah. So Rogers is jealous, just not like that. He’s jealous that James is acting like a nice, normal person around other people, and a sullen teenager around him. James doesn’t know how to explain that he _feels_ like a sullen teenager around Rogers. It’s too much pressure, too much emotion, just too much.

“You’re flirting with nurses, you’re pals with Stark,” Rogers says.

James frowns. “I am not.” What a ridiculous idea. Except. Is he? What do you call someone who gives you a place to live and functional arm? “We’re learning to work together,” he allows.

“He just called you his favorite nonagenarian.”

“He likes to joke about my age. Asks me about my hip, puts denture cream in my grocery order.”

“It’s good.” Rogers smiles a half-smile that James can tell is fake. “It really is. It’s just…”

“It’s just what?”

“I don’t understand why you and I can’t be friends,” Rogers says. “I don’t understand why you won’t give me a chance.”

“Friends,” says James, slowly. He’s not sure what to say. He’s not sure why Rogers keeps doing this, keeps making James be the bad guy, making him spell out things that are only going to hurt. “You don’t want to be my friend, Rogers. I’m not the guy that taught you how to kiss a dame or swing a baseball bat; I’m the guy that killed Howard Stark and rearranged your face with my fist.”

Rogers blinks at him; this time he seems utterly unmoved by James’s harsh truths. “My face is fine,” he says. “You think that was the first time I’ve got my nose broken?”

James snorts.

Rogers stands up, brushes crumbs off his hands. “You’re right. I don’t know who you are, James. But I want to. Any time you want to let me in, I’m ready.”

He leaves.

—

For week and a half after the dance, Steve barely saw Bucky, so preoccupied was he with his budding romance. But then one day Bucky appeared at recess and slapped an arm over Steve’s shoulder like he hadn’t been missing for days.

“Where’s Christine?” said Steve. He considered shrugging Bucky’s arm off, so Bucky didn’t think he could just come running back like nothing had happened, but then, Steve liked having Bucky’s arm there, so he left it.

“Turns out beautiful eyes ain’t enough to sustain a relationship Stevie,” said Bucky. “You’ll find out when you’re older.”

Steve scowled. “What did you do?” he said.

“I didn’t _do_ anything.” said Bucky. “That was the problem.” He sighed, a ridiculous pantomime of a world-weary man. “She wanted things I just couldn’t give her.”

“Like what?”

“She wanted me to walk her to _every_ class,” said Bucky. “ _And_ home at the end of the day. And I said I couldn’t do that, I needed to be there to play stickball or we’d lose to the kids from the building across the street. And god knows how many fights you’d get into if I let you walk home from school on your own everyday. But then she said if I couldn’t do that then I clearly wasn’t ready for a serious relationship, and then _I_ said ‘god, I hope not’, and that,” he finished, with a wry grin, “didn’t go down too well.”

Steve thought maybe that was it; the end of their brief foray into the world of girls and dancing; back to the more solid ground of comic books, baseball cards, and back-alley brawls. But no, after Christine Templeton came Isabella Mariano, and after Isabella Mariano came Trudy Waltz. And after Trudy Waltz came—

“Sally Munro says I kiss like a fish,” said Bucky. 

“Since when are you going with Sally Munro?” said Steve, exasperated. 

“Well, I ain't anymore,” said Bucky. “On account of how she said I kiss like a fish. But me an’ Muriel Gardner are going to the movies on Saturday, so I gotta sort it out, if Sally’s right.”

They were supposed to be doing their math homework, but they’d long ago abandoned it in favour of lying side by side in the sunny patch in the middle of Steve's kitchen floor, basking in the almost-summer warmth. 

“You think she’d count herself lucky to have someone willing to kiss her at all,” Steve said. He still wasn’t sure he understood what Bucky liked about all these girls, but if someone had wanted to kiss him, he wouldn’t have complained about it.

Bucky rolled over, so he was facing Steve. “That’s just it, Stevie. Girls are loads pickier about who they kiss.”

“Not hard to be pickier than you,” said Steve.

“I thought maybe you could help me,” said Bucky. “Like you did with the dancing.” 

Steve screwed up his face. “You want to practice kissing on me?” he said.

“C’mon, Steve, do your old pal a favor,” said Bucky. There was a twinkle in his eyes, the one which always used to signal the best kinds of mischief, but these days, Steve noticed, only ever seemed directed at pretty girls. 

Steve’s heart was behaving oddly, like it did when he tried to take the stairs too quickly; a deafening pounding he felt for sure Bucky must be able to hear, but he just ignored it, and said, “Not sure I want to be slobbered on by a fish.”

“I don’t slobber!” said Bucky.

“Oh yeah?” said Steve. “Prove it.” Suddenly he felt like he was back on firm ground, the whole thing just a schoolyard dare.

Bucky let out a strangled noise of indignation and smashed his lips to Steve’s.

So this was kissing, Steve thought. Huh. It was— hmmm. Steve pulled away.

After a moment Bucky pulled back. “Well?” he asked.

“Not like a fish,” said Steve thoughtfully. “More like getting mauled a very sloppy bear.”

Bucky scowled. “Let me try again.” He leaned in and kissed Steve again, gentler this time.

Steve was definitely beginning to see the appeal of kissing. His heart was pounding louder than ever, and there was an odd fluttering feeling somewhere near his navel, but it was… nice. Kissing was nice.

Bucky pulled away this time. “How was that?” he asked.

“Hmm,” said Steve. “Better, I suppose.”

“Steve,” said Bucky. “You’re not exactly building up my confidence here.”

“More confidence is the last thing you need,” said Steve.

“That’s it,” said Bucky, and he tackled Steve, rolling them both until he was pinning Steve to the ground. “You’re a goddamn punk, you know that?”

Steve grinned up at him. “I think you’ve mentioned it before,” he said. He squirmed slightly. “Try again.”

“All right,” said Bucky. “Bossy.” He leaned down and kissed Steve for a third time. 

Oh, thought Steve. _Oh._ Suddenly he wasn't sure _nice_ was the right word. This time, Bucky’s body pressed against him, he felt the kiss right down to his toes. 

“Bucky!” someone yelled outside the window — Becca, calling up from the Barnes’s apartment directly below. “Ma says to come down for dinner,” she hollered. 

Bucky detached his lips from Steve’s and sat up. “Thanks Stevie,” he said, beaming. “Muriel’s not gonna know what hit her.”

Steve stared at him, dumbfounded, feeling like he’d been hit with some kind of anvil. But Bucky just clapped him on the back and then scurried down the fire escape. 

Steve lay there, his hand tracing the ghost of Bucky's lips on his.

—

Steve stands outside James’s door, tries to catch his breath. _Taught ME how do kiss a dame_? he thinks, indignantly.

Then, with crystal clarity: _he remembers._


End file.
